Re: Documentation on page files

On Sat, 20 Apr 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

> Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> writes:
> > Chapter 7 of the Developers guide in about the Page Format on disk and it's
> > a little out of date not to mention somewhat incomplete.
>
> Indeed, this seems to have very little relation to reality :-(.

I dunno, it seems to be not too bad to me, though woefully incomplete.
I too was considering writing an updated version of this.

> I'm not sure if the
> "continuation" mechanism it describes ever existed at all, but it sure
> hasn't been there since the code left Berkeley.

Yeah, I was wondering about that. This has been replaced by TOAST, right?

> > 2. If not, would patches be accepted to correct the situation?
>
> Go for it.

Yes, please! I'd be happy to review and updated version.

One thing that would be good, since this is a developers' guide,
would be to include references to the source files and dates from
which the information comes. That way one could see if updates are
necessary by doing a diff on those files between the given date
and the head, to see what changes have been made since the description
was written. Also good would be to have the data structures explicitly
named so that when one dives into the source, one already has a
good idea of what one's looking at.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC