From: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
Message-Id: <200007170255.WAA12386@candle.pha.pa.us>
Subject: Re: Platform-specific "FAQs" are waaaaaay outdated
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0007170346160.11173-100000@localhost.localdomain>
	"from Peter Eisentraut at Jul 17, 2000 04:24:19 am"
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 22:55:07 -0400 (EDT)
CC: pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
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> The platform-specific FAQs in the doc/ area have clearly been suffering
> from, er, letter rot.
> 
> Quoth FAQ_Linux:
> 
> "This was a problem in 1.08 [...]. It is fixed in 1.09 and 6.0"

Yikes, that is very old.  Man, who is maintaining these.


> 
> Some of the material goes on for pages about problems which have quite
> obviously been fixed or suggests fixes which provably don't work.
> 
> To me this is clearly an out of sight/out of mind problem and it needs to
> be fixed, like this:
> 
> * Platform-specific installation problems are documented in the
>   installation instructions. No after the fact, "sorry the real
>   installation procedure doesn't work for FooNix".
> 
> * Regression test problems are documented with the regression tests.
> 
> * Information about how to set up shared memory and other resources will
>   also find a home in the Administrator's Guide in a to be created
>   section.
> 
> * FAQ's will be destroyed, except for a select few.

The reason these are separate files is because at one time, people
running specific platforms maintained them separately.  I actually had
e-mail accounts for Linux and Irix FAQ's.  The maintainer could e-mail
a file to an account here, and the web site and cvs would be updated
automatically.

Of course, having separate maintainers allowed them to keep it
up-to-date with no effort on our part, but when people left, they just
sat there.

I am not sure if we should just clean them up to remove the old stuff,
or merge them into the docs.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
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