Re: [HACKERS] Ready for admin guide and INSTALL

"Thomas G. Lockhart" <lockhart(at)alumni(dot)caltech(dot)edu> writes:
> I've posted almost-final installation instructions in html format on the
> web site at
> ftp://postgresql.org/pub/patches/installation.tar.gz

It's looking pretty good. I have a few more suggestions...

Major suggestion: chapter 3 (detailed discussion of configure options)
probably ought to be placed after the step-by-step install, not before.
A person who doesn't already know what configure is would be pretty lost
upon hitting the first page of chapter 3, I think.

Minor stuff:

Install step 9 says:

Note: There are two places in this installation procedure where you will
have an opportunity to specify installation locations for programs,
libraries, documentation, and other files. Usually it is sufficient to
specify these at the make install stage of installation.

Make install?? I think it is much safer to tell people to select these
locations during configure. I would not want to bet that you can change
the install target just by tweaking make parameters at the install step.
On HPUX, for example, that will definitely fail, because the path to the
shared libraries in /usr/local/pgsql/lib (eg) is embedded into the
binaries for psql and friends at build time, not install time.

In the lengthier discussion of configure options, I recommend not listing
--datadir=DIR read-only architecture-independent data in DIR
[PREFIX/share]
--sysconfdir=DIR read-only single-machine data in DIR [PREFIX/etc]
--sharedstatedir=DIR modifiable architecture-independent data in DIR
[PREFIX/com]
--srcdir=DIR find the sources in DIR [configure dir or ..]
--with-x use the X Window System
These are generic configure options that are not actually used by our
setup, so they're hardly worth listing. Also, I suggest adding
--without-CXX do not try to build C++ code
(which is mentioned inline in the install procedure, but it's missing
in the allegedly more complete discussion of options...)

And in the trivia category: ports list refers to HPUX "9.0.x", but it
should say "9.0x".

regards, tom lane