Re: INSTALL file

On 30.10.18 11:49, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
>
> On 10/30/2018 06:14 AM, Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum wrote:
>> On 30.10.18 04:11, Michael Paquier wrote:
>>> On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 01:01:47PM +0100, Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
>>> wrote:
>>>> That is not the first file people looking at. Especially not people
>>>> looking
>>>> at the GitHub copy:
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/postgres/postgres
>>>>
>>>> I understand that there is documentation, but for the casual developer
>>>> looking at this, it seems broken.
>>> FWIW, I think that people depend too much on github and what github
>>> thinks projects should do to be more presentable, like adding a
>>> markdown-style README or such.
>>>
>>> I get your point that people look at README first though, and that the
>>> current status is confusing.  One idea would be to merge the
>>> contents of
>>> README.git into the README.  However the current status also makes some
>>> sense, as INSTALL is part of an distributed tarball, while
>>> README.git is
>>> automatically removed when running "make distdir".  Looking at
>>> README is
>>> the first thing I do when checking out any project or after
>>> decompressing any source code tarball, so things could be better.
>>
>>
>> Right, thanks. That's why one of my proposals was to have an INSTALL
>> file in place, and overwrite it during the tarball creation process.
>>
>> This way the general INSTALL file is there, and can contain "general"
>> instructions, and later on is overwritten by a specific INSTALL file
>> for the tarballs.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> That has the potential to be somewhat confusing:
>
>    "The INSTALL file says ..."
>
>    "Which INSTALL file are you referring to?"
>
>
> Merging README.git into README make sense.
>
> I think our attitude has generally been that if you're a developer you
> should build from git, in which case we assume you know what you're
> doing, and everyone else should build from a tarball. That's arguably
> somewhat old-fashioned, specially since you can download release
> tarballs/zips from places like
> <https://github.com/postgres/postgres/releases> Sadly, these won't
> have the artefacts created by "make dist". Maybe those too are less
> important these days.
>

Most experienced developers will know, I think. This was raised during
the Google Code-In project, where students stumbled over this, and asked
where the INSTALL file is ...

This has potential to confuse anyone new to PostgreSQL, and it's a
burden which can easily be avoided.

--
Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
German PostgreSQL User Group
European PostgreSQL User Group - Board of Directors
Volunteer Regional Contact, Germany - PostgreSQL Project