Re: Cognitive dissonance

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