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From: eric@wdl47.wdl.fac.com (Eric Kuhnen)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: INGRES manuals
Message-ID: <1990Dec19.153403.630@wdl1.wdl.loral.com>
Date: 19 Dec 90 15:34:03 GMT
References: <366@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
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sue@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au (Sue McPherson) writes:
>Two of the programmers in my group have been develping applications using
>INGRES (release 6) in a Unix environment.
>They have both complained (quite forcefully) about the manuals provided
>with INGRES, in particular;
>- difficulty finding information
>- lack of cross-referencing within documentation
>- incorrect details, ie. instructions for passing a parameter to a report
>  show the use of quotes, after much trial and error it turns out a
>  different combination of quotes are required.
>They seem to spend a considerable amount of time 'browsing' through the 
>manuals looking for information and quite often find it by chance or when
>they are looking for something else.
>I have two questions;
>1) Does everyone have the same problem with the manuals?

Yes, I have found INGRES to be masters of obfuscation.  However, the manuals
are much improved over the 5.0 manuals I used to have.  The 6.0 manuals do
have cross-referencing, but not at the same detail level as, say, a MS-Word
4.0 manual for the Mac.

"Q"