On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> Changing the scope of the search on the basis of whether or not a >> pattern is present strikes me as a terrible idea. It's confusing and >> unlikely to make anyone happy. > > Huh? The pattern itself "changes the scope of the search", so I don't > see how this is a conceptual violation. > > Not that I'd personally be unhappy with dropping that part of the > proposal, but this doesn't seem like a good argument against it.
I don't understand your confusion. You're once again proposing to have \df display only user functions, and \df <pattern> search both user and system functions. That doesn't seem remotely sane to me. Now I do "\df"and get a list of 30 functions, and that's more than I want to wade through so I do "\df a*" and get a list of 60 functions. Yuck! I feel pretty strongly that making the pattern search against a different list of stuff than what the same command would display without the pattern is confusing and a bad idea. It's a bad idea regardless of which particular backslash-sequence we're talking about. It doesn't work that way in 8.3.x, it doesn't work that way in CVS HEAD, and it seems quite obvious it will confuse and annoy end-users. ...Robert -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers