Re: Split Distro

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Henshall, Stuart - WCP wrote:

>     When I downlaod a full tarball I want it all, I'm greedy like that.
> ;)
> If it is to be split up as standard I believe problems will arise with
> different versions being used together (by me most likley...). Also IMHO it
> will not necessarily be relised the docs have not been down loaded which
> means refering to older docs if there was a previous installation, or not
> finding any if no previous install.
>     Also to prevent confusion it might be usefull to have the split
> distro in its own sub directory (eg Postgresql-7.1-Split-Distro, or
> somesuch), as when I first looked in on the download directory it was not
> imediatly obvious there was one main tarball and the rest where a split
> version rather than a main one with optional stuff (which is not my favoured
> option).

Well, unless you have a broken client, the first thing you get when you
enter the directory that the files are in is:

=====================
Information regarding the split distribution
--------------------------------------------

In the various download directories you will find alongside files with
names like

postgresql-XXX.tar.gz

(where XXX is a version number) smaller files with the names

postgresql-base-XXX.tar.gz
postgresql-opt-XXX.tar.gz
postgresql-docs-XXX.tar.gz
postgresql-test-XXX.tar.gz

The file named "postgresql-XXX.tar.gz" is the full source distribution.
Each of the other four "tarballs" contains a subset of the files from the
full distribution, for downloading convenience.  If you download all four
of them and unpack them into the same directory you will get exactly what
you would have gotten had you downloaded the full distribution.

The -base package is the only one that is required for successful
installation.  It contains the server and the essential client interfaces.
The -opt package contains all parts whose compilation needs to be enabled
explicitly.  This includes the C++, JDBC, ODBC, Perl, Python, and Tcl
interfaces, as well as multibyte support.  The -docs package contains the
documentation in HTML format (man pages are in -base) and the
documentation sources.  You don't need to download this package if you
intend to browse the documentation on the web. Finally, the -test package
contains the regression test suite.

(Note, this scheme is new as of version 7.1RC4.  Previous versions used a
different, incompatible split where all subpackages where required.)

===================