Re: Replication Documentation

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > > >I don't think this sort of material belongs directly into the
> > > > PostgreSQL documentation.
> >
> > Why not?
>
> PostgreSQL documentation (or any product documentation) should be
> factual: describe what the software does and give advice on its use.
> This should be mostly independent of the external circumstances,
> because people will still read that documentation three or four years
> from now.
>
> The proposed text is, at least partially, journalistic: it evaluates
> competing ideas, gives historical and anecdotal information, reports on
> current events, and makes speculations about the future. That is the
> sort of material that is published in periodicals or other volatile
> media.

I can see value in documenting what replication systems are known to
work (for some definition of work) with a given release in the
documentation for that release. Five years down the road when I'm
trying to implement replication for a client who's somehow locked into
postgres 8.2 (for whatever reason), it would be very helpful to know
that slony1.2 is an option. I don't know if this is sufficient
justification.

Including a separate page on the history of postgres replication to
date also makes some sense, at least to me. It should be relatively
easy to maintain.

If we do talk about replicatoin, then including a probably separate and
presumably quite static page on the taxonomy of replication seems
necessary. As Chris notes, the term replication by it'self is can mean
quite a number of things.

> At the summit, we resolved, for precisely these reasons, to keep the
> journalistic parts on the web site, for clear separation from the
> shipped product and for easier updates (and for easier reference as
> well, because the PostgreSQL documentation is not the single obvious
> place to look for it) and refer to it from the documentation.
>
> --
> Peter Eisentraut
> http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/
>
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