Re: Documentation needs significant improvement

On Thursday 30 Jan 2003 11:06 pm, you wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 06:33:13PM -0600, Chris Johnson wrote:
> > Lincoln Yeoh wrote:
> > Not to start a flame-fest, but really, just fine? No room at all for
> > improvement? Or very little room for improvement? Let's take a
> > positive approach, instead of a defensive one.

OK. (Sorry I am replying to a reply but lost original one.)

> > What I was looking for was the answer to the questions: "I've
> > got a running instance of PostgreSQL. I want to get
> > administrative control of the access (users) and create any
> > initial databases (if necessary). How do I do that? Which do
> > I do first?"

Well, I hope you have read postgresql 101, I have written. Who is postgresql
superuser? Any OS user that starts the postmaster process. It is as simple as
that. Why you need a pre-defined postgreql superuser? Is pg_ctl too hard for
you?

So you have a running instance of postgresql. Who is postgresql superuser. The
userid with which postmaster is running. Is it that difficult to understand?

> > It was non-obvious that the Unix username pgsql was the only
> > pre-existing superuser available, and that it had no default
> > database, but rather required use of template[01]. Or
> > alternatively, through the magic of opaque behavior, one can
> > run createuser and it will magically use template[01], or when
> > trying to use createdb magically, one has to know somehow that
> > one must be the Unix user which owns the databases (pgsql on
> > FreeBSD).

That has nothing to do with postgresql. It can run with any user as superuser.
OS users postgresql and pgsql are packaging wrappers created by OS packagers
like freeBSD and distros. You are all too free to run a instance by yourself.

> > I'll be more than happy to contribute better documentation.
> > However, I looked in the "how to contribute" section and it
> > only talked about source code patches, so I was lead to
> > believe that documentation was not open to modification by the
> > user community.

Join the postgresql-doc mailing list. You will find more than enough ways to
contribute.

Nothing is wrong with anything, either you or postgresql documentation. It's
just that the documentation assumes some knowledge of OS administration.
Probably they should mention it ..;-)

Shridhar