On Thu, Feb 3, 2022 at 12:28:05PM +0800, Julien Rouhaud wrote: > Hi, > > On Wed, Feb 02, 2022 at 07:35:36PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > The Postgres community is great at diagnosing problems and giving users > > feedback. In most cases, we can either diagnose a problem and give a > > fix, or at least give users a hint at finding the cause. > > > > However, there is a class of problems that are very hard to help with, > > and I have perhaps seen an increasing number of them recently, e.g.: > > > > > > https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/17384-f50f2eedf541e512%40postgresql.org > > > > https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CALTnk7uOrMztNfzjNOZe3TdquAXDPD3vZKjWFWj%3D-Fv-gmROUQ%40mail.gmail.com > > > > I consider these as problems that need digging to find the cause, and > > users are usually unable to do sufficient digging, and we don't have > > time to give them instructions, so they never get a reply. > > > > Is there something we can do to improve this situation? Should we just > > tell them they need to hire a Postgres expert? I assume these are users > > who do not already have access to such experts. > > There's also only so much you can do to help interacting by mail without > access to the machine, even if you're willing to spend time helping people for > free.
Agreed. > One thing that might help would be to work on a troubleshooting section on the > wiki with some common problems and some clear instructions on either how to > try > to fix the problem or provide needed information for further debugging. At > least it would save the time for those steps and one could quickly respond > with > that link, similarly to how we do for the slow query questions wiki entry. I think the challenge there is that the problems are all different, and if we had a pattern we could at least supply better errors and hints, unless I am missing something obvious. Does someone want to go back through the bugs@ archive and see if they can find a pattern? -- Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> https://momjian.us EDB https://enterprisedb.com If only the physical world exists, free will is an illusion.
