Re: patch: Allow \dd to show constraint comments

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:36 PM, Josh Kupershmidt <schmiddy(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Precisely, and I think there's a solid argument for putting
> constraints into bucket 1 above, as this patch does, since there's no
> good room to display constraint comments inside \d+, and there's no
> backslash command specifically for constraints.
>
> 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.

Frankly, I think \dd is a horrid kludge which has about as much chance
of being useful as a fireproof candle. I don't really object to the
patch at hand: it'll probably solve your problem, or you wouldn't have
bothered writing the patch. At the same time, I can't shake the
feeling that it solves your problem mostly by accident. Clearly, you
have more than no comments on constraints (or you wouldn't care) and
you must also have few enough constraints on the types of objects
which \dd has randomly decided to care to make it feasible to look at
one big list and pick out the information you're interested in. It's
hard to work up a lot of enthusiasm for that being a common situation,
even though, as you say, this certainly isn't making anything any
worse.

I continue to think that the right fix for this problem is the one I
proposed here:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-09/msg01080.php

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