Re: postgresql book - practical or something newer?

On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Dave Page wrote:

> We intentionally have not done that as we wanted to ensure that all
> documentation published under postgresql.org was appropriately
> moderated first.

OK, so hosting a probably inaccurate in many ways (at first) community
documentation project wiki is inappropriate for a postgresql.org page;
completely understandable. That "moderated first" thing is part of the
problem with using Techdocs I already mentioned.

Can anyone think of another place a community docs wiki could go at? I
don't have any good web hosting facilities here right now. I just took a
look at buying a cheap host somewhere, but I feel it would be
inappropriate to host a PostgreSQL documentation wiki on a shared host
where the underlying database was *censored*.

The 8.3 launch yesterday gave me a perfect example of why this would be
helpful. I was blasting away in the Slashdot FUD about the release (with
Dave Fetter and Neil) and somebody stopped me cold with a comment about
their last eval of PostgreSQL. They'd ended up so confused by the initial
config they said "the default install iirc uses unix users to authenticate
into their own databases, whereas mysql has its own internal user
database" (completely understandable mistake given the old defaul auth
setup) and their comment on the big manual was "I can never find what I'm
looking for."

When I sat down to write about the parts they were missing, it was all in
the manual, but boy did it take me a while to assemble it all. Open the
manual and think like a newbie one day and you'll see what I mean--Chapter
15, "Installation Instructions", are not what people expect, and the
pieces I think most people need are scattered. I don't think this is a
problem to "fix" in the manual, it's just that the manual's audience and
the newbie requirements are really far apart.

The response I wrote is at
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=441604&cid=22301248 It struck me that
what I'd just written would make a nice first draft for a "Getting started
with PostgreSQL" page for the UNIX CLI crowd, and if I could dump that
into a reusable, upgradable form easily I'd have just made a more
permanent improvement to the community. The way pages like this get to be
really good, though, is by being a wiki where people who find them not
enough can improve them after they figure out the part that wasn't obvious
when they first read it.

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