Re: User documentation vs Official Docs - Mailing list pgsql-general

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 3:19 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> wrote:

On 07/16/2018 03:14 PM, David G. Johnston wrote:

What does the community think about a community run, community organized, sub project for USER documentation? This type of documentation would be things like, "10 steps to configure replication", "Dumb simple Postgres backups",  "5 things to NEVER do with Postgres". I imagine we would sort it by version (9.6/10.0 etc...) as well as break it down via type (Administration, Tuning, Gotchas) etc...

What do we think?

​Politely tell them to buy some of the many well written books that are available on these very topics...

Politely tell them to buy a license to MSSQl...

Kind of misses the whole point doesn't it?

​I'm going for practicality over idealism here.  That some of the best written material for learning how to be an application developer or DBA is presently really only available in the forms of books is a fact of our existence.  I frankly don't have a problem that there isn't a "free beer" resource available to complete with it.

Fair enough but what about those that cant afford it? I think us in the Western World tend to forget that by far the majority of users cant afford a latte from Starbucks let alone a 60.00 USD dead tree.

I'm all for continual improvement but color me doubtful that there is enough desire and discipline here to invent and then maintain a high-maintenance system.  So, yes, I am intentionally trying to avoid the trap that is problem that you want to solve by suggesting forgetting the revolution and instead coming at the problem from an entirely different angle and working to evolve the equilibrium that presently exists.

Hey, don't get me wrong. I get your point but I also know what I hear and I hear from *lots* of users because of PostgresConf and all the meetups. I am just trying to resolve a problem that exists for that community. Think of this (if we can figure out how to pull this off): User on StackOverflow says, "How do I do X", someone answers with a direct link to a recipe on PostgreSQL.Org that tells them exactly how to do X (with caveats of course). There isn't much more user friendly than that.

I am also not suggesting this wouldn't be work but it is also work a lot more people can do than people that can submit a patch to -hackers (exponentially so).

IMO,

JD

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