Re: Documentation and explanatory diagrams

Rafael Martinez wrote:
> Well, I was thinking about DIA [1]. It runs on Unix, Windows and Mac.
> It loads and saves diagrams to a custom XML format and it can export
> diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG.
>

I keep a copy of Windows around to run exactly four programs: Word,
Excel, Quicken, and Visio, the program Dia was partially inspired by.
Dia has such a terrible UI that I will boot an entire VM just to use
Visio instead.

In any case, the sort of diagrams you're asking about are created
regularly, they just show up in presentations created for conferences
and the like rather than appearing in the official documentation.
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_Related_Slides_and_Presentations
is a good starting point. The short list at
http://www.postgresql.org/developer/coding has two of the better ones
around, Tom's "A Tour of PostgreSQL Internals" and Bruce's "Database
Internals Presentation", which has now expanded to be "PostgreSQL
Internals Through Pictures" at
http://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/internalpics.pdf

Given that's how the work is being done by community members right now,
I think you'd make better progress asking how to index the material in
those slides better and provide a hotlist of good slides on the Wiki. I
consider fighting the battle to get the diagrams directly into the docs
the way it would need to be done to be both impractical and a waste of
resources, given many of these diagrams do already exist (and new ones
are constantly generated) if you follow the presentation scene.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.us