Re: User documentation vs Official Docs

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> · Mon, 16 Jul 2018 16:55:28 -0700



    On 07/16/2018 03:37 PM, David G.
      Johnston wrote:

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