As Tom says, this doesn't really address my original issue, which was not that I read the material on encoding and misunderstood it, but that I didn't even see that material because it was mixed in with a bunch of other notes on all sorts of random subjects. To address this issue in the documentation at large, I would like to see every command that has I18N/L10N-related behavior have a separate sub-head for the explanation of that behavior. That way, anyone who needs to know about that aspect (which should be everyone), just has to look for the sub-head to be sure they have found what they need to know. Whilst I know we can't do that for every single cross-command topic, it seems to me that I18N/L10N is sufficiently important to users of pg that it merits this treatment. FWIW, I think error handling/behavior also merits its own sub-heads throughout. And there should be links within the pages to sub-heads (cf. DB2's online doc). Of course, all of this would be a substantial project. Note that for the COPY command the I18N/L10N material covers both DateStyle and encoding. In respect of Bruce's proposed changes, I prefer the original wording (for the same reasons as Tom), but with the addition of the mention of the server - "... read from or written to a file directly by the server". -- Peter Headland Architect Actuate Corporation -----Original Message----- From: Bruce Momjian [mailto:bruce@xxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 22:01 To: Tom Lane Cc: Peter Headland; Adrian Klaver; pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: COPY command character set Tom Lane wrote: > Bruce Momjian <bruce@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > I have updated the documentation to be more direct about COPY encoding > > behavior. Patch attached and applied. > > Uh, why exactly do you find that better? "Processes data" seems a lot > vaguer to me than the previous wording. I certainly don't think that > this does much to address Peter's original complaint. I thought the problem was that we said "input", then "output" and then got to the point about the server, and I thought the reader just stopped reading that far, so I tried to shorten it so the idea was sooner, and I mentioned "server" at the end. It might not be better, but I tried. We don't want to highlight the input/output, we want to highlight that all input and output are controlled by the client encoding. -- Bruce Momjian <bruce@xxxxxxxxxx> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com PG East: http://www.enterprisedb.com/community/nav-pg-east-2010.do + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. + -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
