Re: New developer papercut - Makefile references INSTALL

Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:
> If anything, I'm more behind the idea of just getting rid of the
> INSTALL file. A reference to the install instructions in the README
> should be enough today. The likelihood of somebody getting a postgres
> source tarball and trying to build it for the first time while not
> having internet access is extremely low I'd say.

I agree that there's no longer a lot of reason to insist that the
installation instructions need to be present in a flat text file
as opposed to some other way.

However, just putting a URL into README seems problematic, because how
will we ensure that it's the correct version-specific URL? (And it does
need to be version-specific; the set of configure options changes over
time, and that's not even mentioning whatever user-visible effects
changing to meson will have.) You could imagine generating the URL
during tarball build, but that does nothing for the people who pull
directly from git.

I thought briefly about directing people to read
doc/src/sgml/html/installation.html, but that has the same problem
that it won't be present in a fresh git pull.

regards, tom lane