Hi Tom, I agree mostly. It actually does have the words “SQL identifier” in the patch. But you are right it doesn’t link to what a SQL identifier is, but it does provide a practical solution of quoting. That was the part I cared about as a user, I just wanted to solve my problem of an email address as a role name (yes I know that’s sort of dumb as email addresses change). This also addresses the question, why just here, because this was a pain point in the docs for me yesterday :)
I also agree your ideal solution is definitely better than what I pushed. But I’m not ready to take that on. If someone else is, I welcome their patch over mine. -Tara — “Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” > On Aug 18, 2019, at 9:41 AM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > > t...@anne.cat writes: >> Attached is a minor patch to fix the name param documentation for create >> role, just adding a direct quote from user-manag.sgml talking about what the >> role name is allowed to be. I was searching for this information and >> figured the reference page should have it as well. > > Hm, I guess my reaction to this proposal is "why just here?". We have > an awful lot of different CREATE commands, and none of them say more > about the target name than this one does. (Not to mention ALTER, DROP, > etc.) Perhaps it's worth adding some boilerplate text to all those > places, but I'm dubious. > > Also, the specific text proposed for addition doesn't seem that helpful, > since it doesn't define which characters are "special characters". > I'd rather see something like "The name must be a valid SQL identifier > as defined in <link to section 4.1.1>." But, while that would work fine > in HTML output, it would not be particularly short or useful in man-page > output. > > Perhaps the ideal solution would be further markup on the synopsis > sections that somehow identifies each term as an "identifier" or > other appropriate syntactic category, and provides a hyperlink to > a definition (in output formats that are friendly to that). Seems > like a lot of work though :-( > > regards, tom lane
