Maciek Sakrejda <m.sakrejda@gmail.com> writes: > I just spent some time helping a former colleague work out some basic setup > issues after he got stuck trying to follow the Getting Started section of > the manual [1] and almost gave up. For what it's worth, he's very > technical, but does not deal with Postgres setup regularly. > ... > Obviously this is not a solution for everyone, but I think packaging is > more common and more standardized these days, and administrators who may > have set up Postgres for you and can help you get started are less common.
Agreed, but I should think that properly packaged versions of Postgres will come with some package-specific instructions. Is that missing in Debian's version, or out of date, or did he just not read it?
It's definitely there for debian - it's in /usr/share/doc/postgresql-common/README.Debian.gz
It might not be a bad thing for us to add some text near the head of "Getting Started" pointing out that it's meant for manual installations, and encouraging people to look to package-specific docs when present.
And probably even exactly where those docs are to be found for at least the most common platforms, I think.
The bigger question is, is it worth actually more or less importing the contents of that into our main documentation. After all, 99% of our users (or something thereabouts) are probably using the packaged versions, which means that those parts of our documentation are simply irrelevant to them... Which is not great when it's the "getting started" part.
