Re: documentation structure

On Tue, Mar 19, 2024 at 5:39 PM Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
> +many for improving the index.

Here's a series of four patches. Taken together, they cut down the
number of numbered chapters from 76 to 68. I think we could easily
save that much again if I wrote a few more patches along similar
lines, but I'm posting these first to see what people think.

0001 removes the "Installation from Binaries" chapter. The whole thing
is four sentences. I moved the most important information into the
"Installation from Source Code" chapter and retitled it
"Installation".

0002 removes the "Monitoring Disk Usage" chapter by folding it into
the immediately-preceding "Monitoring Database Activity" chapter. I
kind of feel like the "Monitoring Disk Usage" chapter might be in need
of a bigger rewrite or just outright removal, but there's surely not
enough content here to justify making it a top-level chapter.

0003 merges all of the "Internals" chapters whose names are the names
of built-in index access methods (Btree, Gin, etc.) into a single
chapter called "Built-In Index Access Methods". All of these chapters
have a very similar structure and none of them are very long, so it
makes a lot of sense, at least in my mind, to consolidate them into
one.

0004 merges the "Generic WAL Records" and "Custom WAL Resource
Managers" chapter together, creating a new chapter called "Write Ahead
Logging for Extensions".

Overall, I think this achieves a minor but pleasant level of
de-cluttering of the index. It's going to take a lot more than one
morning's work to produce a major improvement, but at least this is
something.

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