Re: Suggestion: Which Binary?

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