Re: documentation structure

On Fri, Mar 22, 2024 at 9:35 AM Peter Eisentraut <peter(at)eisentraut(dot)org> wrote:
> >> But this separation was explicitly added a few years ago, because most
> >> people just want to read about the binaries.
> >
> > I really doubt that this is true.
>
> Here is the thread:
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CABUevExRCf8waYOsrCO-QxQL50XGapMf5dnWScOXj7X%3DMXW--g%40mail.gmail.com

Sorry. I didn't mean to dispute the point that the section was added a
few years ago, nor the point that most people just want to read about
the binaries. I am confident that both of those things are true. What
I do want to dispute is that having a four-sentence chapter in the
documentation index that tells people something they can find much
more easily without using the documentation at all is a good plan. I
agree with the concern that Magnus expressed on the thread, i.e:

> It's kind of strange that if you start your PostgreSQL journey by reading our instructions, you get nothing useful about installing PostgreSQL from binary packages other than "go ask somebody else about it".

But I don't agree that this was the right way to address that problem.
I think it would have been better to just add the download link to the
existing installation chapter. That's actually what we had in chapter
18, "Installation from Source Code on Windows", since removed. But for
some reason we decided that on non-Windows platforms, it needed a
whole new chapter rather than an extra sentence in the existing one. I
think that's massively overkill.

Alternately, I think it would be reasonable to address the concern by
just moving all the stuff about building from source code to an
appendix, and assume people can figure out how to download the
software without us needing to say anything in the documentation at
all. What was weird about the state before that patch, IMHO, was that
we both talked about building from source code and didn't talk about
binary packages. That can be addressed either by adding a mention of
binary packages, or by deemphasizing the idea of installing from
source code.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com