Re: pg_comments (was: Allow \dd to show constraint comments)

On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 10:11 AM, Josh Kupershmidt <schmiddy(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 7:47 PM, Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> wrote:
>> Just tested this out on current master.  I tried this on every object
>> capable of having a comment, and the view reports all of them with the
>> correct details.  Doc changes look fine, except for some reason you
>> removed a full-stop (period) from after "For all other object types,
>> this column is zero."
>
> Thanks for the review. Looks like I got confused about where I was
> whacking around in catalogs.sgml, good catch of a spurious change.
> Fixed patch attached.

So, I think the critical question for this patch is "do we want
this?". Tom didn't like it, and I have to admit I'm somewhat
demoralized by the discovery that we can't make effective use of this
in psql. On the flip side, rooting through pg_description and
pg_shdescription with home-grown queries is un-fun, and it's not clear
that \dd solves the problem well enough that we don't need anything
else. On the third hand, Josh's previous batch of changes to clean up
psql's behavior in this area are clearly a huge improvement: you can
now display the comment for nearly anything by running the appropriate
\d<foo> command for whatever the object type is. So ... is this still
a good idea, or should we just forget about it?

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company