Re: User documentation vs Official Docs

On 07/16/2018 03:37 PM, David G. Johnston wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 3:19 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com
> <mailto:jd(at)commandprompt(dot)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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