John Naylor <jcnaylor@gmail.com> writes:
> On 4/9/18, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Meh, I think either is fine really. I do recall changing something
>> in bki.sgml that referred to both "bootstrap relations" and "bootstrap
>> catalogs" in practically the same sentence. I think that *is* confusing,
>> because it's not obvious whether relation and catalog are meant to be
>> interchangeable terms (and, in general, they aren't). If we wanted to
>> do anything here I'd be more interested in s/relation/catalog/g in this
>> usage.
> I was curious, so did these searches
> git grep 'bootstrap\S* relation'
> git grep 'system .*relation'
> and dug through a bit to find cases where 'catalog' is clearly a
> better term. Most of these are in the pg_*.h/.dat file boilerplate
> comments, which would be easy enough to change with a script. If we're
> going to do that, the word order of this phrase now seems a bit
> awkward:
> definition of the system "access method" catalog (pg_am)
> so we may as well go the extra step and do:
> definition of the "access method" system catalog (pg_am)
> Thoughts?
Makes sense to me --- I suspect that the original phrasing was chosen
by somebody whose native language wasn't English.
> Beyond that, there are many cases where the language might be
> debatable, or at least it's not obvious to the casual observer whether
> it could also be referring to an index or toast table, so it's
> probably best to leave well enough alone for most cases.
Agreed, there's no need to go overboard here. But let's fix that
awkward construction in the catalog header files, as well as anyplace
else where it seems like a clear win. Will you send a patch?
regards, tom lane