Re: documentation structure

I was looking at the documentation index this morning[1], and I can't
help feeling like there are some parts of it that are over-emphasized
and some parts that are under-emphasized. I'm not sure what we can do
about this exactly, but I thought it worth writing an email and seeing
what other people think.

I don't know what other people's experience is, but for me, wanting to
know what a command does or what a setting does is extremely common.
Therefore, I think these chapters are disproportionately important and
should be emphasized more. In the case of the GUC reference, one idea

I have is to split up "III. Server Administration". My proposal is
that we divide it into three sections. The first would be called "III.
Server Installation" and would cover chapters 16 (installation from
binaries) through 19 (server setup and operation). The second would be
called "IV. Server Configuration" -- so every section that's currently
a subsection of "server configuration" would become a top-level

I don't know what to do about "I. SQL commands". It's obviously
impractical to promote that to a top-level section, because it's got a
zillion sub-pages which I don't think we want in the top-level
documentation index. But having it as one of several unnumbered
chapters interposed between 51 and 52 doesn't seem great either.

The stuff that I think is over-emphasized is as follows: (a) chapters
1-3, the tutorial; (b) chapters 4-6, which are essentially a

Thoughts? I realize that this topic is HIGHLY prone to ENDLESS
bikeshedding, and it's inevitable that not everybody is going to
agree. But I hope we can agree that it's completely silly that it's
vastly easier to find the documentation about the backup manifest
format than it is to find the documentation on CREATE TABLE or
shared_buffers, and if we can agree on that, then perhaps we can agree
on some way to make things better.