On Sat, Jan 3, 2026 at 11:30 PM Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 2, 2026, at 10:54, Robert Treat <rob@xzilla.net> wrote:
> Hi Robert,
>
> Thanks you very much for your review.
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 2:22 AM Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Hacker,
<snip>
> 2. In sub-command details section, "ADD COLUMN [ IF NOT EXISTS ]” missed “[]" with “COLUMN”, which is misleading,
because“COLUMN” is actually optional.
>
> Seems technically correct and potentially useful, and I see you
> handled this for the DROP COLUMN variant as well, so I could see a +1
> on this one.
>
> Thanks for confirming.
>
>
> 3. For all “alter column” sub-commands, "ALTER [ COLUMN ]” are omitted, which is also confusing, because none of
othersub-commands omit their prefix part.
>
>
> Hmm... I'm curious what you find confusing about this. Is the
> confusion in trying to find or understand the information presented,
> or confusing as to why it isn't all documented the same way? The
> downside of your "fix" is that this introduces a lot of extra text
> that is more or less noise, especially for folks trying to skim the
> documents looking for very specific command references. And while I
> agree that we aren't 100% consistent on this within the ALTER TABLE
> subcommands, we use this same mixed pattern of omission on other pages
> (see ALTER TYPE for instance). If we were to insist on making this
> consistent here, I think we'd probably need to look at other pages as
> well and evaluate or update them too. I'm not sure that would be an
> improvement though.
>
>
> The confusion came from my own first-time reading of the documentation. Since the page is quite long, when I was
readingthe action descriptions and wanted to confirm the exact sub-command syntax, I often had to scroll back up to the
syntaxsection. That led me to think it might be helpful to include the full sub-command form directly with the action
descriptions.
>
> That said, I understand your concern. The change did make the text longer and added noise. In v2, I’ve therefore
revertedthat broader change. As you pointed out, if we were to pursue this kind of consistency, it would need to be
handledacross other similar pages as well, which would be better done as a dedicated and more carefully scoped patch.
>
> So, v2’s scope is significantly reduced, only a fix for my original point 2 is retained.
>
Makes sense to me and seems like an improvement, so +1.
Robert Treat
https://xzilla.net
