On Sun, Jun 26, 2005 at 10:59:37AM -0700, Bob Pawley wrote:
> I'll date myself so you all may know from where I am coming. My first
> lesson in binary math took place in a classroom in 1958. Since then I have
> witnessed a lot that has since swept under the bridge.
<snip>
> People want tools to do tasks. They do not want to spend their own time (or
> their own money to hire others) to build, design, repair or change the
> tools that they need just in order to accomplish their own work - the work
> they know best and from which they make a living. A good tool - a perfect
> tool - is like a hammer. Its use is immediately known and it can be
> deployed quickly, accurately and with little or no specialized training.
I would point out that the use of a hammer is obvious because it really
only has one use. Maybe two. A database is something else. It's a
system that provides as service and tries to please a lot of different
types of potential users, not all of which want the same thing.
> So I caution all to not make light of newbies who are searching for good
> tools (not even perfect tools - yet) to do the work that needs doing. The
> world will not sit by and continue to pay for Wang operators.
People who don't care about how it works should simply install PGAdmin
III and then they don't need to understand PATHs. People who don't know
what a command line does should stay away from it. They aren't required
to use it (in theory, windows is a new port so it might need some
work). People who do know won't learn it from us, they will know it
from elsewhere.
And on the other hand, PostgreSQL shouldn't play with global settings
unless really needed. Windows is a new port so there mau still be some
bugs to work out. If people need a non-standard setup then no graphical
interface is going to make it much easier for them...
Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a
> tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone
> else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.