Thread: Re: [pgsql-www] the sad state of our FAQs
Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote: > Our FAQs are in a really sad state and it#s about time to think about > what we want to do about that because in the current state there are > creating much more harm than good. [...] > My proposal is to move all the FAQs to the wiki(just with what happened > with the developer FAQ) with the hope that more people get interested in > keeping them up to date and only reference those on the main page that > at least contains "somewhat" accurate information.I honestly believe > that the current state is more damaging that not having any (translated > FAQs) at all. I completely agree that having a bad translation is worse than not having a translation at all. However, enthusiastic people will translate anything you throw at them, and if the tools don't help, the results will be less than ideal; bad formatting, slightly wrong answers, outdated answers. If we move the FAQ to the wiki, the outdated translations will not disappear nor be automatically updated. I claim that if we move them to a translatable framework that helps people notice when the translation is nonexistant or out of date, we will have better results. I proposed this previously but got no support from Bruce who is supposed to be the FAQ maintainer, and thus I ended up doing nothing. Therefore I now offer to do the job required to move them to XML Docbook and allow translatability using xml2po or something similar. -- Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/ PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> writes:
> If we move the FAQ to the wiki, the outdated translations will not
> disappear nor be automatically updated. I claim that if we move them to
> a translatable framework that helps people notice when the translation
> is nonexistant or out of date, we will have better results.
> I proposed this previously but got no support from Bruce who is supposed
> to be the FAQ maintainer, and thus I ended up doing nothing. Therefore
> I now offer to do the job required to move them to XML Docbook and allow
> translatability using xml2po or something similar.
ISTM there are two separate issues here. One is whether we want to get
the FAQs out of CVS and into some more widely-editable place. The other
is whether to adopt some tools/framework to ease maintenance of
translated versions. I'm in favor of both (though am not personally
prepared to expend any work for it :-(). I do not know whether xml2po
is the most suitable tool, though.
The one good thing that having the FAQs in CVS does for us is make it
fairly easy to have version-specific FAQs. I don't think we've really
exploited that capability, except in the indirect sense that we simply
stopped updating back branches' FAQs (which hardly seems ideal). So
losing it doesn't seem like a showstopper objection to me. Still, it's
something that might be nice to preserve if we can.
regards, tom lane
Brendan Jurd <direvus@gmail.com> writes:
> Although to be frank I think the value of per-version FAQs is dubious.
> I would be totally okay with seeing the back-branch FAQs abandoned in
> favour of the One FAQ (to rule them all, etc).
> Perhaps, instead of back-branch FAQs which are bound to be mostly an
> old copy of the One FAQ, we could have some kind of "Things to Note If
> You're Running an Older Version" article.
In the past, Bruce has not hesitated to rip out or replace FAQ entries
as soon as they became obsolete. That approach would have to change if
we went to a one-true-FAQ approach. In particular, it's often the case
that the best way to do something depends on which version you're
running.
I think it might well be true though that it'd be better to have one FAQ
with answers that say something like "Before version x.y, do this ...
in x.y and later, do that ...". That approach makes sure that people
know that they are reading version-specific advice; whereas the separate
FAQs approach makes it pretty easy for people to fail to notice that
they are reading advice that's inappropriate for their version.
I guess the sticking point would be about how long to preserve FAQ
entries that are no longer relevant to the current release.
regards, tom lane
On Mar 7, 2009, at 2:33 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Brendan Jurd <direvus@gmail.com> writes: >> Although to be frank I think the value of per-version FAQs is >> dubious. >> I would be totally okay with seeing the back-branch FAQs abandoned in >> favour of the One FAQ (to rule them all, etc). > > I think it might well be true though that it'd be better to have one > FAQ > with answers that say something like "Before version x.y, do this ... > in x.y and later, do that ...". That approach makes sure that people > know that they are reading version-specific advice; whereas the > separate > FAQs approach makes it pretty easy for people to fail to notice that > they are reading advice that's inappropriate for their version. Another approach would be to tag each FAQ with what version it was created for and what version it is deprecated for. (pretty much what Brenden suggested, but slightly less overhead than listing all versions the FAQ applies to) Then we could do cool things like generate the version specific FAQs programmatically and not ever worry about removing them. -Selena
Alvaro Herrera wrote: > I proposed this previously but got no support from Bruce who is supposed > to be the FAQ maintainer, and thus I ended up doing nothing. Therefore > I now offer to do the job required to move them to XML Docbook and allow > translatability using xml2po or something similar. I am fine with whatever changes people suggestion; the FAQ just isn't updated that often for me to care where it resides. -- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +
Bruce Momjian wrote: > Alvaro Herrera wrote: >> I proposed this previously but got no support from Bruce who is supposed >> to be the FAQ maintainer, and thus I ended up doing nothing. Therefore >> I now offer to do the job required to move them to XML Docbook and allow >> translatability using xml2po or something similar. > > I am fine with whatever changes people suggestion; the FAQ just isn't > updated that often for me to care where it resides. I think that statement alone is a good indicator of why it has to be moved. Some figures for the interested, btw. The FAQ had ~7700 reads from ~6300 unique visitors last month. These people received information that was simply incorrect. I think that's more than enough people to care about. As a reference point, the Windows FAQ on the wiki had ~6900 reads from ~5800 unique visitors (the most popular page on the wiki other than the frontpage). So I think it's pretty clear that putting it on the wiki doesn't make less people look at it - at least not with the link that's there from the main site. //Magnus
Joshua D. Drake wrote: > On Sat, 2009-03-07 at 16:53 -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote: > > > I proposed this previously but got no support from Bruce who is supposed > > to be the FAQ maintainer, and thus I ended up doing nothing. Therefore > > I now offer to do the job required to move them to XML Docbook and allow > > translatability using xml2po or something similar. > > I would like to see us have a single documentation standard though. Our > core docs are still Docbook SGML which is a bit different :( Other than > that, I am all for it. Magnus has extor^Wconvinced me over IM to drop this idea, which means less work for me. Yay! -- Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/ PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
Joshua D. Drake wrote: > On Sat, 2009-03-07 at 16:53 -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote: > >> I proposed this previously but got no support from Bruce who is supposed >> to be the FAQ maintainer, and thus I ended up doing nothing. Therefore >> I now offer to do the job required to move them to XML Docbook and allow >> translatability using xml2po or something similar. > > I would like to see us have a single documentation standard though. Our > core docs are still Docbook SGML which is a bit different :( Other than > that, I am all for it. I think, although others might disagree, that the FAQ is by its nature more of a web resource than a software documentation resource. So it ought to be managed by the standards of the web site, e.g., rapid releases, version independent, whatever translation system the web site uses. (I consider the wiki to be an extension of the web site, for this argument.)
Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote: > With some help from alvaro I just moved the current version of the FAQ > to http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/FAQ. For now this is mostly just a > reformatted version of what is on the main site with some minor > adjustments done (like spelling fixes and some invalid URLs removed). > > I will look into updating the website if people think this version is fine. There are some very minor formatting glitches left, but the good thing about this being on the wiki is that anybody can go and fix them. The bad thing is that translations have to be maintained by hand (as they always have). The spanish one is already in place: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Preguntas_Frecuentes Stefan tells me that Mediawiki has plugins to help with the translation, but for now they continue to require hand inspection. We'll welcome more information on this regard. -- Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/ PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
Stefan Kaltenbrunner escribió: > So maybe the current FAQ needs an overhaul in the sense of reducing it > to a much smaller number of things in the main FAQ and replacing the > rest of the things with something that provides much easier access to > the available resources(which I frankly think the search and the wiki > already does so people are not actually reading the FAQs any more). Okay, so the FAQ is now on the Wiki. Is anybody actually going to work on overhauling it? I'm also wondering why do we have two pages, FAQ and Frequently_Asked_Questions. Shouldn't they be merged? -- Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/ PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
On Tue, 17 Mar 2009, Alvaro Herrera wrote: > I'm also wondering why do we have two pages, FAQ and > Frequently_Asked_Questions. Shouldn't they be merged? I started putting stuff on that other page while I waited for the official FAQ to get migrated over. There are a fair number of wiki pages tagged in the FAQ category as well. Some of those are too big to really merge usefully into the FAQ, others might get dumped into the main document. Several of the pages listed on there were aimed to replace or supplement existing entries in the full FAQ from the start. As an example, "4.2 How do I control connections from other hosts?" has considerably less information than any newbie needs to resolve those problems, as anybody hanging out on IRC is painfully aware. I wrote an initial draft of something on the "Client Authentication" page on the Wiki to help pull together pointers to all the relevant places in the documentation, into something closer to a walkthrough, and the result is larger than FAQ-entry length. That's going to stay a FAQ *page* instead, I think, one that gets pointed to as a supplemental reference for the terse description given for 4.2 right now. I can help sort through all this once I get past my next conference gig in another week, all my spare time has been spent tormenting systems with pgbench lately. -- * Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
Greg Smith escribió: > That's going to stay a FAQ *page* instead, I think, one that gets > pointed to as a supplemental reference for the terse description given > for 4.2 right now. Sure, that makes a lot of sense. -- Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/ The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.