Robert Treat wrote:
The problem is that PostgreSQL is moving out of the realm of "hard-core
geeks only" and more into the mainstream. I'd bet a number of our users
have very little idea how autoconf and it's progeny work. It's probably
not unlikely that those folks would be able to figure out where their
perl was, but then not know how to tell it to configure.
Most such users would use a binary distribution, though - either from
the OS supplier or from our collection of binaries. If people are going
to build postgres themselves from source then I *do* expect them to be
moderately hard-core geeks.
ISTM that by any measure of the general population, David Wheeler is a
hard-core geek. :-) Actually by most measures of the "programming/oss
community" he is a hard core geek. But he still got tripped up by this. A
lot of people never get passed ./configure;make;make install even though they
do a lot of coding on oss projects. Why turn these people away?
Robert,
You missed my point completely. I am not saying we should turn away
people like David. In fact, it was me who suggested to him that he
should write to -hackers on this subject. All I was saying was that we
should not feel a need to tailor the configure script for people who
aren't hard core geeks, as Jim was suggesting. I agree that we should
help people like David.
cheers
andrew
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TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
