Re: New developer papercut - Makefile references INSTALL

=?UTF-8?B?Sm9zZWYgxaBpbcOhbmVr?= <josef(dot)simanek(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> There is README.git explaining this. README itself is meant to be used
> for distributed source code. You can generate INSTALL locally for
> example by running make dist (INSTALL will be present in
> postgresql-15devel directory).

> Anyway I do agree this is confusing. Maybe we can actually rename
> README.git to README and current README to README.dist or similar.
> README.dist can be copied to distribution package as README during
> Makefile magic.

IIRC, we discussed that when README.git was invented, and concluded
that it would just create different sorts of confusion. I might
be biased, as the person who is generally checking created tarballs
for sanity, but I really do not want any situation where a file
appearing in the tarball is different from the same-named file in
the git tree.

Perhaps it could be sane to not have *any* file named README in
the git tree, only README.git and README.dist, with the tarball
preparation process copying README.dist to README. However,
if I'm understanding what github does, that would leave us with
no automatically-displayed documentation for the github repo.
So I'm not sure that helps with samay's concern.

regards, tom lane