Re: Our naming of wait events is a disaster.

Isaac Morland <isaac(dot)morland(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> ... I'm wondering because it seems
> like it might be helpful to have a system view which gives all the wait
> event types, names, and descriptions. Maybe even add a column for which
> extension (or core) it came from. The documentation could then just explain
> the general situation and point people at the system view to see exactly
> which wait types exist in their system.

There's certainly an argument for doing things like that, but I think it'd
be a net negative in terms of quality and consistency of documentation.
We'd basically be deciding those are non-goals.

Of course, ripping out table 27.4 altogether would be a simple solution
to the formatting problem I started with ;-). But it doesn't really
seem like the answer we want.

> Of course if the names get passed in ad hoc then such a view could only
> show the types that happen to have been created up to the moment it is
> queried, which would defeat the purpose.

Yes, exactly.

I don't actually understand why the LWLock tranche mechanism is designed
the way it is. It seems to be intended to support different backends
having different sets of LWLocks, but I fail to see why that's a good idea,
or even useful at all. In any case, dynamically-created LWLocks are
clearly out of scope for the documentation. The problem that I'm trying
to deal with right now is that even LWLocks that are hard-wired into the
backend code are difficult to enumerate. That wasn't a problem before
we decided we needed to expose them all to user view; but now it is.

regards, tom lane