Haas: The PostgreSQL Documentation and the Limitations of Community

Robert Haas looksat the advantages and disadvantages of how documentation for PostgreSQLis written.

The strengths of this process are also its weaknesses. A developeris, by definition, someone who spends the majority of their timedoing development, which is to say writing code. Updating thedocumentation becomes a task that must be completed so that thecode one has written can get committed so that one can move on tothe next project and write some more code. If a change to thedocumentation would be beneficial but is unrelated to anyparticular patch, it's not likely to get done.

The results are, in a certain sense, pretty comical.