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From: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
To: Craig Ringer <[email protected]>
Cc: Steve Atkins <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Images in the official documentation
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 23:16:49 -0500
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAMsr+YEfh3qgxDeyAThi-nv0k3ptxhOZKW44kKzcaspGnWzC2A@mail.gmail.com>
References: <[email protected]>
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Craig Ringer <[email protected]> writes:
> On 26 February 2018 at 04:12, Steve Atkins <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Writing SVG by hand maybe doesn't seem the best idea.
>> I understand the attraction to people who want to store everything as
>> diffable text, but images of this sort are unlikely to get updated by
>> others, which means they're unlikely to be maintained as the things they're
>> intended to document change. It also means that the people best suited to
>> generating diagrams are the least likely to do so, and vice-versa.

> Yeah, I think it'd just effectively preserve the status quo by rendering
> anyone who's willing to add images and designs to the docs unable - or
> unlikely to be willing - to do so.

This is an entirely reasonable complaint.  But I don't see how we'd cope
with patches that rewrite an entire SVG file because the patch author's
WYSIWG editor emits its output in a style randomly different from the tool
the previous patch author used.  It seems like such patches would be
effectively unreviewable, and certainly incapable of being merged.

Maybe we could improve matters a bit by insisting that everyone use the
same version of the same SVG-editing tool.  But that's not too practical.
Worse, from what I've seen, even that would not really fix the problem.
The tools simply don't give a damn about comparability of their dump
files.  I don't blame their authors exactly (try diffing Postgres data
file changes :-() but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem for us.

How can we resolve these issues?

			regards, tom lane

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