Re: Bug in psql

On Mon, 3 Feb 2025 at 04:36, David G. Johnston <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com>
wrote:

> Relations are a super-class of table-things. There are many subtypes of
> relations. \d Lists relations of all subtypes. You can also add a single
> letter to \d to limit the listing to only the subtype-specific relations.
> That is what the E is doing here.
>

That's an obtuse answer. If everything is "a table thing", why even bother
printing a title? Normally, select() doesn't show a title, so if you're
just going to dump data to the screen with misleading titles, why bother
with a garbage title? And how is \di, list indexes "table things"? You
can't select from an index, so for users they're not relations.

> It seems to be another list of foreign tables but with a different format.
>>
>
> Since \d can only show information limited to the super-class relation,
> and not specific subtypes, the information for the foreign table subtype
> needs to be made available somewhere. That place is \det
>

I don't know what that means, but when two menu items have the same text,
but a different function, Houston, we have a problem.

> I also kind of feel like the name in the help text should always be the
>> name you actually get. So for example, \ddS is described in help as "show
>> object descriptions not displayed elsewhere" (BTW, why is this one "show"
>> and the others are "list"), whereas the output is merely "object
>> descriptions".
>>
>
> This kind of review of consistency doesn't really get treated like a bug
> report in most cases. It makes for a decent technical writing R&D project
> for someone interested in putting in the effort.
>

It's not technical writing, it's part of the program. As much a part of
the program as any menu in a gui program, or window title in a gui program.