From: Michael Talbot-Wilson <mike@calypso.bns.com.au>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 1996 00:37:47 +0930
Subject: [PG95]: Man pages etc.

Hello, all.  This weekend I installed Postgres 95 on FreeBSD
2.1R and joined the list.  Looks super.  Thanks to all concerned.

I noticed some problems with the man pages.  Most of these
can be fixed by replacing

	\*(PG	with	Postgres
	.(C	with	.nf
	.)C	with	.fi

on FreeBSD, using (I think) groff.

In the copy(l) synopsis the double quotes should be single quotes.

And "copy to" silently chucks the stuff I don't know where if I
don't specify a full path.  And it can't be to my home directory,
presumably because Postgres doesn't own it.  The man page is
silent on this point (practically, that one needs to use /tmp),
if I am not mistaken.

I have been unable to do some things that prima facie looked easy
because, says Postgres, an operator is not defined between two
types; e.g. I couldn't select where oid < 20000 because "<" is not
defined between oid and int4.  Postgres tells me I can use a cast,
but how do I do that? "(oid)20000", oid(20000), (int4)oid etc.
don't work.

I first noticed this when trying to write a function whose return
type was char16.  I needed this to create a type which would
match the input string against a string in a table.  I wanted to
enter a string but have a number from the secondary table produced
and entered into the main table.  The "as" clause of the function
was not accepted because it involved a select "where" the input
string was equal to a char16 attribute. Postgres said that "=" is
not defined for char16.  I tried char(16) as the function return
type but that returned a syntax error.

On the other hand, a normal select, "where" the char16 attribute is
equal to a given string, works.  I don't understand this.

Another problem is that the pager does not work for the \h * listing.
How can I see the beginning of this?