I'm breaking out a few questions I'd posed on another thread about the
release timeline [1] into this new thread.
I noticed on the PG13 release announcement that the link for
incremental sort goes to the GUC docs [2] because (as Jonathan Katz
confirmed in the linked thread) that page actually has helpful anchor
tags.
But I'm wondering if instead/also it should point to the examples in
the EXPLAIN docs [3] which actually explain what incremental sort
does. In the initial patch discussion we ended up putting the
explanation there because there was a desire to keep the GUC
descriptions short.
But that raises a larger question: should the GUC page also link to
the EXPLAIN examples? There's not an obvious anchor tag on the page
(that I can tell) to use for such a link though...so that could get
into an ever larger question about adding those anchors.
It seems to me that we don't have a particularly great place for
detail explanations in the docs of the algorithms/nodes/etc. we
use...unless the new glossary section in the docs could fill that
role?
Any thoughts?
James
1: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAAaqYe_kiFZ2T_KhHf8%2BjR_f4YnH%3DhdnN3QDCA1D%2B%2BF0GuHpdg%40mail.gmail.com
2: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/runtime-config-query.html#GUC-ENABLE-INCREMENTAL-SORT
3: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/using-explain.html
