Re: [HACKERS] Re: HISTORY for 6.5.2

Vince Vielhaber wrote:
> it, it's a big package - well worth the effort to learn it, but it's still
> big.  So after putting the poor newbie thru all of this trauma you want to
> further traumatize him/her with man pages?    :)

You know, in two years I gotten quite cozy with PostgreSQL -- but at the
beginning it was not so.  I remember how it felt to FIRST install -- it
WAS intimidating.

Let's just take a look at HOW big postgresql has become: the tarball is
over six megabytes.  It decompresses to around 23 megabytes.  That is
half the size of the Linux Kernel sources, twice the size of a minimal
Windows 95 installation, and three times the size of a complete Windows
3.1 installation.

My first hard drive on my ancient TRS-80 model 4 was 10 megabytes, and
it seemed huge.  The PostgreSQL source tree is two times larger than the
maximum volume size for that OS!  In fact, a source tree that has
completed a make is bigger than the largest volume size for MS-DOS
versions prior to 4.0!

It has a ways to go to beat the 260+MB Oracle 8i installation package,
but it's still a big package.

It takes my Pentium 133 laptop running RedHat 6.0 a full 45 minutes to
build an RPM set -- that's a ./configure; make; make install sequence
with several other operations added on.  A machine that can do over 100
MIPS takes 45 minutes.  Think about it.

I have to say that I agree with Marc on this one, and, Vince, you are
the one who convinced me.

If a newbie (to PostgreSQL) can successfully install from source, then
said newbie won't have a single problem reading a man page.  Even with
the RPM packaging -- if a newbie can find out that you need to su to
postgres and run psql to get at the data (or set up some other client),
then said newbie really doesn't care whether the create db is a script
executed from the unix shell or an SQL command executed from psql. 
Whether it's a shell script or a psql command is irrelevant -- the
newbie is having to learn a new command either way.

IMHO

Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11