Re: Another modest proposal for docs formatting: catalog descriptions

On 5/4/20 9:52 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> As of HEAD, building the PDF docs for A4 paper draws 538 "contents
> ... exceed the available area" warnings. While this is a nice step
> forward from where we were (v12 has more than 1500 such warnings),
> we're far from done fixing that issue.
>
> A large chunk of the remaining warnings are about tables that describe
> the columns of system catalogs, system views, and information_schema
> views. The typical contents of a row in such a table are a field name,
> a field data type, possibly a "references" link, and then a description.
> Unsurprisingly, this does not work very well for descriptions of more
> than a few words. And not infrequently, we *need* more than a few words.
>
> ISTM this is more or less the same problem we have/had with function
> descriptions, and so I'm tempted to solve it in more or less the same
> way. Let's redefine the table layout to look like, say, this for
> pg_attrdef [1]:
>
> oid oid
> Row identifier
>
> adrelid oid (references pg_class.oid)
> The table this column belongs to
>
> adnum int2 (references pg_attribute.attnum)
> The number of the column
>
> adbin pg_node_tree
> The column default value, in nodeToString() representation. Use
> pg_get_expr(adbin, adrelid) to convert it to an SQL expression.
>
> That is, let's go over to something that's more or less like a table-ized
> <variablelist>, with the fixed items for an entry all written on the first
> line, and then as much description text as we need. The actual markup
> would be closely modeled on what we did for function-table entries.
>
> Thoughts?

+1. Looks easy enough to read in a plaintext email, and if there are any
minor style nuances on the HTML front, I'm confident we'll solve them.

Jonathan