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.
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".
reference pages documenting that these commands cannot be used within
a transaction block. Also make some minor improvements to the psql
reference page. Patch from Simon Riggs, minor editorialization by
myself.
clause implicitly whenever one is not given explicitly. Remove concept
of a schema having an associated tablespace, and simplify the rules for
selecting a default tablespace for a table or index. It's now just
(a) explicit TABLESPACE clause; (b) default_tablespace if that's not an
empty string; (c) database's default. This will allow pg_dump to use
SET commands instead of tablespace clauses to determine object locations
(but I didn't actually make it do so). All per recent discussions.
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.
aggregates, conversions, functions, operators, operator classes,
schemas, types, and tablespaces. Fold the existing implementations
of alter domain owner and alter database owner in with these.
Christopher Kings-Lynne
There are various things left to do: contrib dbsize and oid2name modules
need work, and so does the documentation. Also someone should think about
COMMENT ON TABLESPACE and maybe RENAME TABLESPACE. Also initlocation is
dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
Gavin Sherry and Tom Lane.
