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
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
