Re: postgresql book - practical or something newer?

On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Dave Page wrote:

> On Feb 4, 2008 3:48 PM, vincent <vinny(at)xs4all(dot)nl> wrote:
>> So, let's do it community-style: wiki.
>
> Thats what techdocs is for.
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/techdocs
> Feel free to write new articles or improve what is there already.

Techdocs is a functional site to post completed articles. The level of
work and administration involved in making even simple edits, combined
with the lack of tools for managing what other people are doing, make it
dramatically less productive for collaborative projects than true Wiki
tools like the Mediawiki used on the developer's site. Examples of issues
that slow things down considerably are the whole save before preview model
of techdocs and problems that creep in if you switch between its limited
WYSIWIG editor and the HTML editor extensively (just the fact that there
is such a distinction is its own problem, and if you do all your work in
the HTML version you are forced to switch between then). The main thing
it's completely missing is a trivial to use diff and revert. Sadly some
people just don't know what they should and shouldn't be changing, and
it's highly useful for tracking what the other good people are doing once
the pages get bigger if you want to keep general progress going forward in
a consistant way.

It may be possible to build some new community-generated "not the manual"
documentation on a real Wiki platform. I think hobbling it with the
restrictions of techdocs would be a fatal to such a project.

How hard would it be to clone the configuration of the developer's wiki
and make a new page like it for this purpose, something like
userdocs.postgresql.org?

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD