Re: When should be advocate external projects?

Le 12.05.2016 22:58, Bruce Momjian a écrit :
> On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 09:46:25PM +0100, Justin Clift wrote:
>> On 12 May 2016, at 21:24, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
>> > On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 11:44:17AM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>> >>> That's basically what the software catalogue does, isn't it? It needs to be
>> >>> revamped to be more user friendly, and more promoted, but as a basis?
>> >>
>> >> Sure, that kind of idea. I'd forgotten we had that. I think that we
>> >> should go to a format with just one line for each piece of software,
>> >> though, instead of a big box. And try to get it all one one page.
>> >> And remove all of the proprietary products or put them in a separate
>> >> section. And include only stuff that's actually reasonably widely
>> >> used.
>> >>
>> >> Maybe we should just go stand up a wiki page to start. What's in the
>> >> software catalog right now looks useless to me.
>> >
>> > I think our wiki page that lists all the FDWs is great, so why can't we
>> > do this for other external software?
>> >
>> > https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers
>>
>> That page does seem well put together. Guess the main question now is
>> "who will drive this initiative?"
>
> Yep, it is a big job but would be a big win.
>

hey guys,

I don't have a strong opinion on this "external project advocacy"
question so I'm remaining silent on this thread. However I've done some
work on FDW page so here's my feedback about it :

- First, in the long run it's not that much work really. The FDW wiki
has 150 revisions over 6 years (see below) and I take approx. 1 hour
every 2 month to refresh it...

https://wiki.postgresql.org/index.php?title=Foreign_data_wrappers&offset=&limit=250&action=history

- Second, Starting a page or reformating it the only big task. I
launched a complete overhaul of the FDW page in 2015 (link below) and as
much I recall I think it took me 5 or 6 hours over 1 month.... It's not
very hard to do. You just need to have a good vision of the PostgreSQL
community and spend time mostly on github to collect information on each
project. The rest is just handling wiki syntax, which is an incredibly
dull job but in the end it's ego-rewarding because you see the page
growing step by step and it's a very positive effort :)

http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/55DB0C4F(dot)1050508(at)dalibo(dot)info#55DB0C4F(dot)1050508@dalibo.info

- Third, the format is everything. In general, wiki pages contain either
too few (see link A ) or too much information (see link B). Finding the
right balance is the key.

A : https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GUI_Database_Design_Tools
B : https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Monitoring

My experience is that each wiki page that is "a list of things" needs to
define 4 or 6 type of required information and apply the same format to
each projet. In general, that would be : name + website + license +
author + a **tiny** description. For anything else let the projet speak
for itself and let the user find out the information he/she needs and
evaluate the project.

To be more concrete, once you've defined the 4-6 information required
for each project, you can easily put it in a wiki table and new editors
of the page will follow the same format, giving the whole page a simpler
and cleaner look... You can even parse the wiki syntax if you want to
extract stats from the page...

- Four, yes this very different from the pg.org software catalog (link
below) because the format is flexible (you can restructure the page if
needed) and it's way more easier for anyone to edit/add/fix the page.

http://www.postgresql.org/download/product-categories/

If some people are interested, maybe we can try starting a new wiki page
( providing a listing of all the extensions would be nice I think) or
restructure an existing one ( the monitring page is a mess for instance
). However I won't be able to maintain it in the long run as I'm already
involved on the FDW and forks pages...

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Damien Clochard