Re: New developer papercut - Makefile references INSTALL

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 12:19 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> I'm not convinced by this argument. In the first place, the INSTALL
> file isn't doing any harm. I don't know that I'd bother to build the
> infrastructure for it today, but we already have that infrastructure
> and it's not causing us any particular maintenance burden.

I think it *is* doing harm. It confuses people. We get semi-regular
threads on the list like this one where people are confused by the
file not being there, but I can't remember ever seeing a thread where
someone said that it was great, or said that they thought it needed
improvement, or said that they used it and then something interesting
happened afterward, or anything like that. AFAICR, the only threads on
the mailing list that mention the file at all are started by people
who were told to look there and couldn't find the file. Now we can
speculate that there is a far larger number of people who find the
file, love it, and have no problems with it or suggestions for
improvement or need to comment upon it in any way, and that's hard to
disprove. But I doubt it.

> In the
> second place, I think your argument is a bit backwards. Sure, people
> who are relying on a git pull can be expected to have easy access to
> on-line docs; that's exactly why we aren't troubled by not providing
> ready-to-go INSTALL docs in that case. But that doesn't follow for
> people who are using a tarball. In particular, it might not be that
> easy to find on-line docs matching the specific tarball version they
> are working with. (With the planned meson conversion, that's about to
> become a bigger deal than it's been in the recent past.)

I would guess that these days if you're brave enough to compile from
source, you are very, very likely to get that source from git rather
than a tarball. These days if you Google "[name of any piece of
software] source code" the first hit is the git repository. I grant
that the second hit, in the case of PostgreSQL, is a link to download
page for tarballs, but when I try plugging other things in there
instead of "postgresql" the git repository is always the first hit,
and sometimes there's a download page after that. Again, this doesn't
prove anything, but I do think it's suggestive.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com