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 greg@2ndQuadrant.com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.com