Re: New developer papercut - Makefile references INSTALL

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 11:39 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> =?UTF-8?B?Sm9zZWYgxaBpbcOhbmVr?= <josef.simanek@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.

Yeah. And what about just getting rid of the INSTALL file altogether?
I think that, in 2022, a lot of people are likely to use git to obtain
the source code rather than obtain a tarball. 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. 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.

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