Re: Launching PostgreSQL KB Project Mark 2 - Mailing list pgsql-www

> > Josh, in your original mail you said that there were
> companies willing
> > to put resources behind such a project. Does this mean that
> they will
> > dedicate staff time to the *continous maintaining of such a site in
> > the future*, or just that they're interested in getting it started?
>
> In theory, I would think that if done properly, the community
> should be able to sustain things once the seed has been
> created ... no?

Certainly - given that it integrates with existing stuff and doesn't
place a lot of additional technical maintenance burden on the community.
If that's included in yuor "done properly", it's not a problem. It's
clearly not in everybodys "done properly", though, in which case it
becomes a problem.


> > Because frankly, we clearly don't have enough people to
> maintain what
> > we have *today* (if we did, someone wouldn't have been able to hack
> > into our server through a piece of software that wasn't properly
> > updated). If we're going to add more to it, there'd better be some
> > committment behind it for actual maintenance.
>
> In Josh's defence on this one ... you give him a pretty
> strong argument why this can't be community built, but has to
> be done by a corporate "group" ... manpower.

No. If it's built inside current frameworks, it does *not* add a
considerable maintenance burden, then we can deal with it. If it also
gets rid of other maintenance stuff (techdocs), it will *decrease* the
maintenance burden.
Note that I'm talking about technical maintenance, *not* content
maintenance. Those are different things, and it's significantly easier
to scale content maintenance.

And if you're not talking aobut integrated stuff, you're back to your
argument about a non-community KB. Which I don't think is what Josh
intends at all.


> We had this thread/discussion several months back about
> implementing a replacement for techdocs/KB ... but, to date,
> has anything been done?  The feel I've gotten is that
> everything was resting on 'Gevik' for this, so that became
> our single point of failure ...

Not at all. Work is progressing as we speak, and has for a while (though
it was temporarily interrupted when Gevik was working on it the first
time - before taking the timeout).

But this is *just a techdocs replacement*, not a whizz-bang KB. It
fulfills the techdocs requirements for easy editing and searching, and
the communitys erquirements for easy maintenance. It does not fullfill
all the other KB requiremetns (I'm sure, though I haven't seen teh whole
list since it's not finished - but there are definitly several that
aren't). It places the bar a lot lower, making it easier to get done...

No, there's still no ETA on it, but it shouldn't be too far off. The
hardest part tends to be figuring out how the CSS stuff on our site is
actually meant to work, because there are no docs about that.

//Magnus