Hi, On 2022-01-21 11:49:12 -0500, Robert Haas wrote: > On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 11:39 AM Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > > =?UTF-8?B?Sm9zZWYgxaBpbcOhbmVr?= <josef.sima...@gmail.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
