Holes in the install process

Having just installed a few times, and being new to it, I've
fallen in some holes the rest of you may not notice.

For one thing, has anybody recently read the stuff that
prints
at the end of a 'make install'? It gives three or so
pointers
to pages at postgresql.org, which pages do not exist, or at
least cannot be reached as described.

For another the INSTALL document is a bit coy about what
happens when you install as root. If you have Perl
configured,
the process creates at least one file that will cause
problems
if you later try a 'make' as non-root. You won't have
permission to proceed. And I don't like to be root more
than
I have to, so I don't like this.

Moreover, I think the INSTALL instructions should be a bit
more careful about the bits where you have to be the
Postgress
root rather than your usual user name. I found it a bit
frustrating going through the dump/restore process till I
figured that out.

Finally, there may be a real bug in the dumpall/restore
business.
I had a database created with a version I got from some RPM
packages somewhere. I don't remember where, and I surely
didn't
know how they were configured. When I built a new version,
I did NOT configure multibyte support. This caused restore
to
fail because one of the very early commands was setting the
US-ASCII encoding. PostgreSQL barked at me that multibyte
was not supported, and the process stopped. This seems
extreme,
since I'm guessing that no multibyte means I'm locked in
US-ASCII. In any event, this seems an unnecessary gotcha
for the inexperienced, and it may mean that I'm locked into
multibyte suppport that I don't want or need.

--
Kevin O'Gorman (805) 650-6274 mailto:kogorman(at)pacbell(dot)net
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