Re: New developer papercut - Makefile references INSTALL

Hi,

On 2022-01-21 11:49:12 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 11:39 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > =?UTF-8?B?Sm9zZWYgxaBpbcOhbmVr?= <josef(dot)simanek(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > > Another solution would be to merge both README files together and make
> > > separate section for development/git based codebase.
> >
> > There's a lot to be said for that approach: make it simpler, not
> > more complicated.

I agree, that's the right direction.

> Yeah. And what about just getting rid of the INSTALL file altogether?

Yea, I think that might be worth doing too, at least in some form. It's
certainly not helpful to have it in the tarball but not the git tree.

I tried to find the discussion around removing INSTALL from the source tree,
but it seems to actually have centered much more around HISTORY
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/200403091751.i29HpiV24304%40candle.pha.pa.us

It seems quite workable to continue for INSTALL to be generated, but have the
result checked in. The rate of changes to {installation,install-windows}.sgml
isn't that high, and when things change, it's actually useful to be able to
see the current instructions from a console.

Might even be good to be forced to see the text version of INSTALL when
changing the sgml docs...

> I think that, in 2022, a lot of people are likely to use git to obtain
> the source code rather than obtain a tarball.

Indeed.

> And regardless of what method they use to get the source code, they don't
> really need there to be a text file in the directory with installation
> instructions; a URL is just fine.

Even working with git trees, I do quite prefer having the instructions
available in a terminal compatible way, TBH. The building happens in a
terminal, after all. In our case it's made worse by the browser version being
split across ~10 pages and multiple chapters.

> There was a time when you couldn't count on people to have a web browser
> conveniently available, either because that whole world wide web thing
> hadn't really caught on yet, or because they didn't even have an always-on
> Internet connection. In that world, an INSTALL file in the tarball makes a
> lot of sense. But these delays, the number of people who are still obtaining
> PostgreSQL via UUCP-over-modem-relay has got to be ... relatively limited.

There's still people having to build postgres on systems without internet
access - but typically they'll have access to the instructions when developin
the scripts for that...

Greetings,

Andres Freund