Re: patch: Allow \dd to show constraint comments

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 9:00 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Merlin Moncure <mmoncure(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>> I was kind of hoping to avoid dealing with this can of worms with this
>>> simple patch, which by itself seems uncontroversial. If there's
>>> consensus that \dd and the other backslash commands need further
>>> reworking, I can probably devote a little more time to this. But let's
>>> not have the perfect be the enemy of the good.
>>
>> Patch applies clean, does what it is supposed to do, and matches other
>> conventions in describe.c  Passing to committer.   pg_comments may be
>> a better way to go, but that is a problem for another day...
>
> I am inclined to say that we should reject this patch as it stands.
> With or without pg_comments, I think we need a plan for \dd, and
> adding one object type is not a plan.  The closest thing I've seen to
> a plan is this comment from Josh:
>
> --
> ISTM that \dd is best suited as a command to show the comments for
> objects for which we don't have an individual backslash command, or
> objects for which it's not practical to show the comment in the
> backslash command.
> --
>
> If someone wants to implement that, I'm OK with it, though I think we
> should also consider the alternative of abolishing \dd and just always
> display the comments via the per-object type commands (e.g. \d+ would
> display the table, constraint, trigger, and rule comments).  I don't
> want to, as Josh says, let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but
> if we change this as proposed we're just going to end up changing it
> again.  That's going to be more work than just doing it once, and if
> it happens over the course of multiple releases, then it creates more
> annoyance for our users, too.  I don't really think this is such a
> large project that we can't get it right in one try.

no argument.

merlin