On 4/9/18, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> 3. It seems the preferred style is to refer to "bootstrap" relations
>> rather than "bootstrapped" relations. The attached patch makes code
>> comments more like the docs in this regard.
>
> 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?
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.
-John Naylor