elein wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 08:30:51PM +0000, Christopher Browne wrote:
>   
>> Brad Nicholson wrote:
>>     
>>> Christopher Browne wrote:
>>>
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> * There is interest in the perl tools to keep a buffer for the general
>>>> community between admin and the guts of Slony.
>>>>
>>>> (cbb: Is there interest in *working on* the Perl tools? As an OSS
>>>> project, there is a need for volunteers. In the case of the Perl tools,
>>>> past volunteers have stepped away, so we kind of need new ones...)
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> Was there any discussion as to what area the perl tools were lacking in?
>>>   
>>>       
>
> Yes.  I added my two bits regarding that they must be properly maintained
> and better documented.
>
> I am considering writing the howto for slony administration using the
> processes I use for perltools.   These would be task oriented rather
> than the nuts and bolts documentation required by the development
> team.  There is no "dba off the streets" level of documentation, imho,
> except the little I've written so far.
>
> Should I take this on as a pgfoundry project or just rework the 
> how to documents?  I don't want to step on toes or to eliminate the
> nuts and bolts documentation we already have.
>   
There is a section with a "task orientation"; we started by constructing
a list of "seemingly interesting" tasks on the Wiki
<http://slony-wiki.dbitech.ca/index.php/Howto>, and I took the results,
extended them, and put that into the admin guide; see the CVS pointer
<http://gborg.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/slony1-engine/doc/adminguide/addthings.sgml?rev=1.17;content-type=text%2Fplain;cvsroot=slony1;only_with_tag=HEAD>

It would seem to me that extending that would make the documentation set
more complete, and the ability to interlink inside the one document
seems valuable too.

There is certainly benefit in adding material there; you can link to the
Slonik reference guide (the existing material points to the manual pages
pretty extensively), as well as to material elsewhere.  The material I
put in didn't make reference to any of the altperl tools, but you'd
certainly be able to <xref> to them, which would make it more valuable
to beef up the altperl documentation as well...