Re: Tech Docs and Consultants

Folks

<Tirade Warning>

> - Requiring submitters to understand CVS. But honestly, I'm not sure
> about the quality of any tech document written by someone who doesn't.

Aha, now the "geekier than thou" attitude comes through.

One of the things that we could desperately use for TechDocs, for example, is
an article like "Creating An OpenOffice.org Mail Merge document from a
PostgreSQL database." In what way does the author of such a document need a
knowledge of CVS?

Or take the Book Review page. How does a knowledge of CVS have *any* bearing
on how good the book reviews are?

Pardon my tirade, but I've been seeing this attitude not just from Scott, but
from lots of people on this list and on -Hackers as well. The attitude is
"If you're not a top geek, we don't want you in our club." The problem with
this attitude is that top geeks only constitute .0002% of the population, and
only about 5% of the software developers.

Projects, and companies, that forget that end up being sidelined by teams that
take a more populist approach. Witness the success of MS Access.

As far as I am concerned, the main purpose of TechDocs should *not* be to
support PostgreSQL Programmers. They can join Hackers and read the source
code. We need TechDocs to support the less technical users ... which other
users can do on a peer-to-peer basis, *IF* they are not required to become
"top geeks" before they are allowed entrance into the hollowed halls of our
exclusive club.

There are certainly people in our community who prefer PostgreSQL as a small
OSS project with a limited membership. I respect that; we have a very nice
group and I don't really look forward to the kind of community management
headaches that popular projects like OpenOffice.org have. However, I am an
independant consultant, and if PostgreSQL gets sidelined by MySQL, I will be
forced to use MySQL to support my customers. I don't want that to happen.

<end tirade>

--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco