Re: Documentation/help for materialized and recursive views

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:20 AM, David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:
> With deepest respect, failing to provide documentation to users on our
> widest-deployed platform seems pretty hostile to me.

Yes, that would be pretty hostile. However, we don't do anything that
remotely resembles that statement, nor has anyone proposed any such
thing.

Personally, I think this whole thread is much ado about nothing.
Magnus is basically arguing that people might expect that CREATE VIEW
ought to tell you about CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW also, but I don't
find that argument to have a whole lot of merit. Views and
materialized views are pretty different things; it is a bit like
asking why Googling for "dog" does not give you information on hot
dogs. The output of psql's \h command is intended to be a succinct
synopsis summarizing the salient syntax (try saying that five times
fast), not a comprehensive reference. If you want the latter, read
the fine manual. I admit that this particular case is slightly more
prone to confusion than some, but I'm just not that exercised about
it. Every bit of detail we add to the \h output is better for the
people who otherwise would have been unhappy, but it's worse for all
the people who did need it because it's more to read through.

Regardless of whether you agree with or disagree with the above
statement, building a high-quality documentation reader into psql so
that users who are running Windows but not mingw, cygwin, or pgAdmin
can access the documentation more easily doesn't seem like the correct
solution to this problem. I don't really object if somebody wants to
do it (although someone else may object) but it's certainly taking the
long way around as far as this particular confusion is concerned.

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