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Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 08:59:25 +0200
Message-ID: <AANLkTinyM3UJqZykZKz6fPEddQAGkVyGb22XxJprNL8R@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Cognitive dissonance
From: Brian Modra <brian@zwartberg.com>
To: John Gage <jsmgage@numericable.fr>
Cc: PostgreSQL - General <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On 09/06/2010, John Gage <jsmgage@numericable.fr> wrote:
> 1) On a list that howls with complaints when posts are in html, it is
> surprising that there is resistance to the idea of documentation in
> plain text.
>
> 2) Posters are correctly referred to the documentation as frequently
> as possible.  In fact, very frequently.  The frequency might decrease
> if the documentation were in plain text.  It is easier to search a
> single plain text file than any other source, except perhaps the
> database itself.
>
> 3) Postgres is getting pushed off the map at the low end by MySQL, now
> owned by Oracle.    If Postgres ceased to exist, Ellison would be
> thrilled.  I chose A2 Hosting (with whom I am very happy) for my
> website because they support Postgres.  I'm writing cgi scripts in
> perl.  I had to install the postgres driver for dbi.  It was not pre-
> installed.  There are about four buttons for MySQL on the cPanel and
> two farther over on the right for Postgres.
>
> An anecdote.  I discovered the tsvector functionality a while back.  I
> have used it to create indices for my text files and several other
> tasks.  I recently was re-looking at my files and saw
> "tsvector::text".  I had forgotten that the double colon is one way to
> cast a type.  Double colon is not in the html index of the
> documentation.  I found it by searching my plain text version of the
> pdf file.  In my opinion, the html documentation is useful for reading
> it like a novel or referencing it in these lists.
>
>
> On Jun 8, 2010, at 9:56 PM, Josh Kupershmidt wrote:
>
>> Not that I see a whole lot of utility in this endeavor

Personally I like to use html docs, and it would be good if the
documentation were downloadable from the postgresql website in other
formats, for convenience...

But, what I use is this, which works pretty well:

(e.g. to get the 8.1 dosc)

mkdir postgresql
cd postgresql
wget -r -nH -l 10 -k -np
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/index.html

... then after it all downloads:

open the file docs/8.1/interactive/index.html
in your web browser.

e.g.
links docs/8.1/interactive/index.html


HTML is "text", so you can search using grep e.g.
grep -r "ALTER TABLE .* ADD COLUMN" docs/8.1

>
>
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