Re: About the partial tarballs

On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> Marc G. Fournier writes:
>
> > > Do we have any data on how many people download the partial tarballs
> > > (-base, -opt, etc.)? I have a feeling that more people are confused by
> > > them than use them.
> >
> > on ftp.postgresql.org itself, since June 4th:
>
> Interesting. Note that in most cases people download the -base tarball
> less often than the other ones, at best just as often as the other ones.
> This seems to indicate that people appear to want everything and they are
> confused about what they need to download.

I think a good README file explaining this would be good ... again, where
packages are concerned, there are no questions ... but, explaining to
someone that if they need, say, just the psql command, they only need to
download -base and -opt, that same downloading ~3.5Meg worth of files that
they don't need ...

As for docs ... if someone wants to download the docs, but doesn't need
any of the source (ie. someone is using PostgreSQL off of a remote server,
but would like the docs local), having to download 11Meg to get 2.6Meg
worth of docs is quite excessive ...

>
> > Note that, in the case of FreeBSD ports, they download only base and opt:
>
> They don't install the documentation??? How is that a good idea?

I never install documentation, I always go to http://www.postgresql.org
*shrug*

But, FreeBSD ports has:

svr1# ls -ld databases/postgresql-*
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512 Nov 1 04:25 databases/postgresql-client
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512 Sep 27 04:24 databases/postgresql-contrib
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 512 Jul 26 04:31 databases/postgresql-devel
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512 Jul 26 04:31 databases/postgresql-docs
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 512 Jul 26 04:31 databases/postgresql-jdbc
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512 Jul 26 04:31 databases/postgresql-libpq++
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512 Jul 26 04:31 databases/postgresql-libpqxx
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512 Jul 26 04:31 databases/postgresql-odbc
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 512 Jul 26 04:31 databases/postgresql-plruby
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512 Jul 26 04:31 databases/postgresql-pltcl
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 512 Jul 26 04:31 databases/postgresql-tcltk

databases/postgresql-docs just downloads and installs the docs ...

the other postgresql-* ports, where those packages are still part of the
main tar ball, only need base/opt to build, and so that's all it downloads
...