Magnus Hagander <mag...@hagander.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