On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Dave Page wrote:
We intentionally have not done that as we wanted to ensure that all documentation published under postgresql.org was appropriately moderated first.
OK, so hosting a probably inaccurate in many ways (at first) community documentation project wiki is inappropriate for a postgresql.org page; completely understandable. That "moderated first" thing is part of the problem with using Techdocs I already mentioned.
Can anyone think of another place a community docs wiki could go at? I don't have any good web hosting facilities here right now. I just took a look at buying a cheap host somewhere, but I feel it would be inappropriate to host a PostgreSQL documentation wiki on a shared host where the underlying database was *censored*.
The 8.3 launch yesterday gave me a perfect example of why this would be helpful. I was blasting away in the Slashdot FUD about the release (with Dave Fetter and Neil) and somebody stopped me cold with a comment about their last eval of PostgreSQL. They'd ended up so confused by the initial config they said "the default install iirc uses unix users to authenticate into their own databases, whereas mysql has its own internal user database" (completely understandable mistake given the old defaul auth setup) and their comment on the big manual was "I can never find what I'm looking for."
When I sat down to write about the parts they were missing, it was all in the manual, but boy did it take me a while to assemble it all. Open the manual and think like a newbie one day and you'll see what I mean--Chapter 15, "Installation Instructions", are not what people expect, and the pieces I think most people need are scattered. I don't think this is a problem to "fix" in the manual, it's just that the manual's audience and the newbie requirements are really far apart.
The response I wrote is at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=441604&cid=22301248 It struck me that what I'd just written would make a nice first draft for a "Getting started with PostgreSQL" page for the UNIX CLI crowd, and if I could dump that into a reusable, upgradable form easily I'd have just made a more permanent improvement to the community. The way pages like this get to be really good, though, is by being a wiki where people who find them not enough can improve them after they figure out the part that wasn't obvious when they first read it.
-- * Greg Smith gsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match
