On Jan 2, 2026, at 10:54, Robert Treat <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Robert, Thanks you very much for your review. On Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 2:22 AM Chao Li <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Hacker, While working on a patch these days, my eyes are on the “alter table” doc, and found multiple errors: 1. Several sub-commands are missed in the top “action” list: * ALTER COLUMN SET <sequence-option> * ALTER COLUMN RESTART I believe these are covered by the line above them: ALTER [ COLUMN ] column_name { SET GENERATED { ALWAYS | BY DEFAULT } | SET sequence_option | RESTART [ [ WITH ] restart ] } [...] * RENAME This is covered by the 4th line ALTER TABLE [ IF EXISTS ] name RENAME TO new_name * SET SCHEMA 5th option... ALTER TABLE [ IF EXISTS ] name SET SCHEMA new_schema * ATTACH PARTITION * DETACH PARTITION * MERGE PARTITION * SPLIT PARTITION And the above are the 7,8,9,10th options at the top. That’s true. I reverted all above changes. 2. In sub-command details section, "ADD COLUMN [ IF NOT EXISTS ]” missed “[]" with “COLUMN”, which is misleading, because “COLUMN” is actually optional. Seems technically correct and potentially useful, and I see you handled this for the DROP COLUMN variant as well, so I could see a +1 on this one. Thanks for confirming. 3. For all “alter column” sub-commands, "ALTER [ COLUMN ]” are omitted, which is also confusing, because none of other sub-commands omit their prefix part. Hmm... I'm curious what you find confusing about this. Is the confusion in trying to find or understand the information presented, or confusing as to why it isn't all documented the same way? The downside of your "fix" is that this introduces a lot of extra text that is more or less noise, especially for folks trying to skim the documents looking for very specific command references. And while I agree that we aren't 100% consistent on this within the ALTER TABLE subcommands, we use this same mixed pattern of omission on other pages (see ALTER TYPE for instance). If we were to insist on making this consistent here, I think we'd probably need to look at other pages as well and evaluate or update them too. I'm not sure that would be an improvement though. The confusion came from my own first-time reading of the documentation. Since the page is quite long, when I was reading the action descriptions and wanted to confirm the exact sub-command syntax, I often had to scroll back up to the syntax section. That led me to think it might be helpful to include the full sub-command form directly with the action descriptions. That said, I understand your concern. The change did make the text longer and added noise. In v2, I’ve therefore reverted that broader change. As you pointed out, if we were to pursue this kind of consistency, it would need to be handled across other similar pages as well, which would be better done as a dedicated and more carefully scoped patch. So, v2’s scope is significantly reduced, only a fix for my original point 2 is retained. Best regards, -- Chao Li (Evan) HighGo Software Co., Ltd. https://www.highgo.com/
v2-0001-docs-reflect-optional-COLUMN-keyword-in-ALTER-TAB.patch
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