Re: INSTALL file

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.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan https://www.2ndQuadrant.com
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