Re: Showing parallel status in \df+

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 3:06 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> I feel like we're getting wrapped around the axle as it regards who is
> perceived to be voting for what.

True. It's not very clear; thanks for trying to shed some light on it.

> I don't particularly care for it either, primairly because \sf could be
> improved upon, as suggested by Peter, to avoid the need to have the same
> information displayed by both \df+ and \sf.

IMHO, we've had \dWHATEVER as the way to find out about things for so
long that we should just stick with it. I think users are used to
remembering which character they need to stick after \d to get
information on the object type in which they are currently interested;
I know I am. If we move this all over to \sf people will have trouble
finding it. I'll get used to it because I "work here" and so will
you, but I think most users will just type \df and then \df+ and then
say ... well where the %(at)#! did they put it?

>> If you do want to see all of the output, you'll appreciate not having
>> it indented by 60 or 80 columns any more. There's really no
>> circumstanced under which it's worse than what we're doing today.
>
> That doesn't mean, at least to me, that we should forgo considering
> better alternatives.

I don't think so, either, but if we could agree that "Tom's patch >
doing nothing" then he could commit it and we could debate whether
there's something even better.

> We often reject patches which only improve a bit on the status quo
> because we wish for a better overall solution, particularly when we're
> talking about user interfaces that we don't want to change between every
> release.

Sure, that's true. In this case, however, I believe that the amount
of improvement that's possible is pretty limited. Super-wide lines
that rapid repeatedly are bad; we can probably all agree on that.
Whether or not it's better to adjust \df+ as Tom has done or introduce
\df++ or enhance \sf or something else entirely is debatable;
different people prefer different things for different reasons - or
for no reason, as some of this is surely down to personal preference.
If I thought Tom's patch solved 20% of the problem while kicking 80%
of it down the road, I'd probably agree that we ought not to adopt it;
but in fact I think it's more like the reverse -- at least in the
narrow sense of keeping \df+ output readable, which I think is about
as ambitious as we should make our goal for a thread that started out
being about showing parallel status in \df+ output.

--
Robert Haas
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