I wrote:
> Josh Kupershmidt <schmiddy@gmail.com> writes:
>> What's the Description displayed in that table?
> What it ought to be is the comment (if any) attached to the index's
> column. Up through 8.4 this worked as expected, but in 9.0 and up
> somebody seems to have disallowed comments on index columns. Not
> sure how carefully that was thought through.
After a bit of review of the archives, the somebody was me:
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git&a=commitdiff&h=b7d67954456f15762c04e5269b64adc88dcd0860
and this thread was the discussion about it:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2009-12/msg01982.php
It looks like we thought about pg_dump, but did not think about psql.
I think it might be reasonable to remove the Description column from
\d+ output for indexes and sequences, on the grounds that (1) it's
useless against 9.x servers, and (2) for those relkinds we add other
columns and so the horizontal space is precious.
We could also consider showing Description only when talking to a
pre-9.0 server; but that's going to render the code even more
spaghetti-ish, and the value seems pretty limited.
regards, tom lane