Re: Suggestion: Which Binary?

On Saturday 01 April 2006 10:47, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> >On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 07:01:18PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> >>David Wheeler <david@kineticode.com> writes:
> >>>Yes, but even the environment variables get me what I want. I
> >>>therefore respectfully submit the attached patch to document them in
> >>>the INSTALL file.
> >>
> >>It seems rather pointless to document two instances of what is in fact
> >>a generic autoconf-script behavior ...
> >
> >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 Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL