Re: Things I don't like about \du's "Attributes" column

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>

From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
To: Pavel Luzanov <p.luzanov@postgrespro.ru>
Cc: Wen Yi <wen-yi@qq.com>, "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Jim Nasby <jim.nasby@gmail.com>, pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2024-05-14T16:03:13Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Tue, Apr 16, 2024 at 3:06 AM Pavel Luzanov <p.luzanov@postgrespro.ru> wrote:
> As for the Login column and its values.
> I'm not sure about using "Can" instead of "yes" to represent true.
> In other psql commands, boolean values are always shown as yes/no.
> NULL instead of false might be possible, but I'd rather check if this approach
> has been used elsewhere. I prefer consistency everywhere.

I don't think we can use "Can" to mean "yes". That's going to be
really confusing.

I don't like (irrelevant) either. I know Tom Lane suggested that, but
I think he's got the wrong idea: we should just display the
information we find in the catalogs and let the user decide what is
and isn't relevant. If I see that the connection limit is 40 but the
user can't log in, I can figure out that the value of 40 doesn't
matter. If I see that the connection limit is labelled as (irrelevant)
I don't know why it's labelled that way and, if it were me, I'd likely
end up looking at the source code to figure out why it's showing it
that way.

I think we should go back to the v4 version of this patch, minus the
(ignored) stuff.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com