Re: A user report of misinterpretation of 'unsupported versions'

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 3:28 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 1:03 AM, Daniel Farina <daniel(at)heroku(dot)com> wrote:
> > I had a report from a user asking how they could VACUUM in the future
> > under 9.3, when it's no longer supported (which took me aback). He
> > referred me to a manual page:
> >
> > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-vacuum.html
> >
> > I realized, then, that the problem is the wordsmithing of:
> >
> > "This page in other versions: 9.2 / 9.1 / 9.0 / 8.4 | Unsupported
> > versions: 9.3 / 8.3 / 8.2 / 8.1 / 8.0 / 7.4 / 7.3 / 7.2 / 7.1 / devel"
> >
> > An entirely reasonable person would decide that the VACUUM command is
> > unsupported in any of the itemized versions.
>
> Strictly speaking, *everything in 9.3 is unsupported. Because it
> hasn't been released yet.
>
> But I can understand the confusion - do you have a suggestion for how
> to write it to make it more obvious what the actual problem is?

I don't think I communicated the problem right. Or maybe I did, but I
can't tell from the response. So, forgive me for hashing it again in
another way.

The problem is the thinking process goes like this:

I'm sitting on a page about VACUUM, and here's a bit of text itemizing
what versions VACUUM exists in. But here's a bit of text saying that
VACUUM isn't supported (read to mean: non-existent) in [7.1,8.3] +
9.3. The thing the user was being led to believe was that VACUUM was
undergoing deprecation.

In other words, he chose to tighter-bind the supported/unsupported to
the topic of the page, rather than the status of the entire release.