Re: documentation structure

On Wed, Mar 20, 2024 at 9:43 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> 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.

I reviewed the most recent set of 5 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".
>

Makes sense

> 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.
>

Just going to note that the section on the cumulative statistics views
being a single page is still a strongly bothersome issue here. Though the
quick fix actually requires upgrading the section to chapter status...

Maybe we can stub out that section in the "Monitoring Database Activity"
chapter and move that entire section after "System Views" in the Internals
part?

I agree with subordinating Monitoring Disk Usage.

> 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.
>

One of the more impactful and wanted improvements, IMO.

> 0004 merges the "Generic WAL Records" and "Custom WAL Resource
> Managers" chapter together, creating a new chapter called "Write Ahead
> Logging for Extensions".
>
>
The positioning of this and the preceding Built-in Index Access Methods
chapter seem like they should be switched.

If this sticks we should add an introductory paragraph for the chapter.

and I've added a new 0005 that does essentially the same
> thing for the PL chapters.
>

The following page needs to be reworded to take the new structure into
account:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xfunc-pl.html

Not having pl/pgsql appear on the main ToC seems like a loss but the others
make sense and a special exception for it probably isn't warranted.

Maybe "pl/pgsql and Other Procedural Languages" as the title?

David J.