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