On 10/16/12 3:24 PM, Thalis Kalfigkopoulos wrote:
Now I'd understand the Pg manual writers being reluctant about
shifting from manual to DB-book, but I'm guessing, the manual being as
well written as it is, that many of us are already using it as a
learning book anyway.

The official manual is a reference manual that also includes some good tutorial material. Just trying to cover that depth well, it's already so large as to be cumbersome--both from the perspective of new readers and the people maintaining it.

Expecting to expand its scope even further toward the tutorial and example side is not something I'd expect to gain much traction. Every example that appears in the manual is yet another place for the documentation to break when code changes are made. And it's the same group of people maintaining both the documentation and the code. Anyone who tries to rev up adding even more docs is going to pull focus off new code. Would you like the core features to expand or to get a new type of documentation? The way things are organized right now, you can't get both.

I would say that it's easier to write 400 pages of material outside of the manual and distribute them to the world than to add 40 pages to the official manual. And I say that as someone who tried wandering down both paths to see which was more productive.

--
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    g...@2ndquadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.com


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