There is what may actually be a mistake in our markup. The problem is
in a situation like
<para>
<command>FOO</command> is ...
there is strictly speaking a line break before "FOO". In the HTML
output, this does not appear to be a problem, but in the man page
output, this shows up, so you get double blank lines at odd places.
So far, we have attempted to work around this with an XSL hack, but
that causes other problems, such as creating run-ins in places like
<acronym>SQL</acronym> <command>COPY</command>
So fix the problem properly by removing the extra whitespace. I only
fixed the problems that affect the man page output, not all the
places.
Block elements with verbatim formatting (literallayout, programlisting,
screen, synopsis) should be aligned at column 0 independent of the surrounding
SGML, because whitespace is significant, and indenting them creates erratic
whitespace in the output. The CSS stylesheets already take care of indenting
the output.
Assorted markup improvements to go along with it.
The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).
This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.
grammar allows ALTER TABLE/INDEX/SEQUENCE/VIEW interchangeably for all
subforms of those commands, and then we sort out what's really legal
at execution time. This allows the ALTER SEQUENCE/VIEW reference pages
to fully document all the ALTER forms available for sequences and views
respectively, and eliminates a longstanding cause of confusion for users.
The net effect is that the following forms are allowed that weren't before:
ALTER SEQUENCE OWNER TO
ALTER VIEW ALTER COLUMN SET/DROP DEFAULT
ALTER VIEW OWNER TO
ALTER VIEW SET SCHEMA
(There's no actual functionality gain here, but formerly you had to say
ALTER TABLE instead.)
Interestingly, the grammar tables actually get smaller, probably because
there are fewer special cases to keep track of.
I did not disallow using ALTER TABLE for these operations. Perhaps we
should, but there's a backwards-compatibility issue if we do; in fact
it would break existing pg_dump scripts. I did however tighten up
ALTER SEQUENCE and ALTER VIEW to reject non-sequences and non-views
in the new cases as well as a couple of cases where they didn't before.
The patch doesn't change pg_dump to use the new syntaxes, either.
sequence to be reset to its original starting value. This requires adding the
original start value to the set of parameters (columns) of a sequence object,
which is a user-visible change with potential compatibility implications;
it also forces initdb.
Also add hopefully-SQL-compatible RESTART/CONTINUE IDENTITY options to
TRUNCATE TABLE. RESTART IDENTITY executes ALTER SEQUENCE RESTART for all
sequences "owned by" any of the truncated relations. CONTINUE IDENTITY is
a no-op option.
Zoltan Boszormenyi
the sequence. Also, make setval() with is_called = false not affect the
currval state, either. Per report from Kris Jurka that an implicit
ALTER SEQUENCE OWNED BY unexpectedly caused currval() to become valid.
Since this isn't 100% backwards compatible, it will go into HEAD only;
I'll put a more limited patch into 8.2.
Sequences and views could previously be renamed using ALTER TABLE, but
this was a repeated source of confusion for users. Update the docs,
and psql tab completion. Patch from David Fetter; various minor fixes
by myself.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
by abandoning the idea that it should say SERIAL in the dump. Instead,
dump serial sequences and column defaults just like regular ones.
Add a new backend command ALTER SEQUENCE OWNED BY to let pg_dump recreate
the sequence-to-column dependency that was formerly created "behind the
scenes" by SERIAL. This restores SERIAL to being truly "just a macro"
consisting of component operations that can be stated explicitly in SQL.
Furthermore, the new command allows sequence ownership to be reassigned,
so that old mistakes can be cleaned up.
Also, downgrade the OWNED-BY dependency from INTERNAL to AUTO, since there
is no longer any very compelling argument why the sequence couldn't be
dropped while keeping the column. (This forces initdb, to be sure the
right kinds of dependencies are in there.)
Along the way, add checks to prevent ALTER OWNER or SET SCHEMA on an
owned sequence; you can now only do this indirectly by changing the
owning table's owner or schema. This is an oversight in previous
releases, but probably not worth back-patching.
SGML markup, add a "deprecated features" section to the 8.0 release
notes, untabify release.sgml and runtime.sgml, and make some other
minor improvements.
Add ALTER SEQUENCE to modify min/max/increment/cache/cycle values
Also updated create sequence docs to mention NO MINVALUE, & NO MAXVALUE.
New Files:
doc/src/sgml/ref/alter_sequence.sgml
src/test/regress/expected/sequence.out
src/test/regress/sql/sequence.sql
ALTER SEQUENCE is NOT transactional. It behaves similarly to setval().
It matches the proposed SQL200N spec, as well as Oracle in most ways --
Oracle lacks RESTART WITH for some strange reason.
--
Rod Taylor <rbt@rbt.ca>
Simon Riggs
Peter Eisentraut
Magnus Hagander
Tom Lane
Neil Conway
Bruce Momjian
PostgreSQL Daemon