Re: [GENERAL] Floating point error

At 2013-03-06 10:04:25 +0000, laurenz(dot)albe(at)wien(dot)gv(dot)at wrote:
>
> How about this elaboration?

Sorry to nitpick, but I don't like that either, on the grounds that if I
had been in Tom Duffey's place, this addition to the docs wouldn't help
me to understand and resolve the problem.

I'm not entirely convinced that any brief mention of extra_float_digits
would suffice, but here's a proposed rewording:

The <xref linkend="guc-extra-float-digits"> setting controls the
number of extra significant digits included when a floating point
value is converted to text for output. With the default value of
<literal>0</literal>, the output is portable to every platform
supported by PostgreSQL. Increasing it will produce output that
is closer to the stored value, but may be unportable.

It's a pretty generic sort of warning, but maybe it would help?

(I'm marking this "Waiting on author" in the CF.)

-- Abhijit