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From: Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>
To: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Platform FAQs
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 23:40:49 +0200 (CEST)
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>

Tom Lane writes:

> IIRC, some of the platform FAQs contain some material that doesn't
> really fit under installation instructions; will you also be adding
> platform-specific notes in the regression test discussion and perhaps
> other places?

To the extent that they do not simply say "there may be differences" when
we know very well that there aren't and shouldn't be any differences, yes.
The only legitimate issue I know of is the ordering problem on IRIX.

> I like the platform FAQ arrangement because it's simple to whip out
> a new platform FAQ based on notes from a port developer.

Yes, it's simple to whip out a new document and then forget about it.
Most of the information is simply redundant, vague, or no longer documents
the preferred methods, and these files encourage documenting problems
rather than fixing them.

> It's also easy for someone using a platform to find all the
> platform-specific material they need to know.  I'm not sure that moving
> the info into the already-massive SGML docs would really be a step
> forward.

We left that route some time ago.  Documentation about configuring kernel
resources is now in the Admin Guide, and it's at least as easy to find it
there if you're thinking of "configuring" your server instead of "hmm, I'm
configuring, so maybe that is a platform-specific issue".  By the same
token, if I'm thinking of installing I would read the installation
instructions and I might expect to find relevant information there,
independent of whether it's platform-dependent, which the user wouldn't
know anyway.

I'll start with merging the redundant information and then see how it
goes.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut   [email protected]

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