[postgis-devel] Updated SVN documentation

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

Hi folks (& Regina),

I've had a look at the new documentation commits for the installation 
section of the SVN trunk manual, and I'd like to ask for them to be 
reverted. The main reason for this is that I don't think the original 
source of instructions is particularly good at all :(

Here are the list of things I've noticed so far:


i) The section at the top which describes versions of things being used

- gcc, pg_config and geos_config are now automatically detected by 
configure (if alternative pg_config/geos_configs are specified, the 
complete path to the version being used is output to the console)

- "ldconfig -v | grep iconv" doesn't help on systems like mine where 
iconv is built into libc

- flex & bison are only needed if you intend to alter the lexer/parser 
since we commit the generated versions into SVN, so normal users do not 
need to worry about this


ii) Hard-coded tarball URLs with version numbers

- The links to the PROJ and GEOS libraries are now hard-coded, with 
version numbers. What would happen if the download URLs changed? Plus if 
people were to download fixed versions by copying and pasting from the 
instructions, they could miss updates for bugs as the packaged 
documentation will be out of date

- Having the tarballs listed like this will make people think that they 
need to compile extra libraries by hand - surely we should be 
encouraging people to use their native package system first, and only 
requiring compilation if these versions are too old?


iii) configure is hidden

- The configure step doesn't particularly clear anymore, at least not to 
my eyes


iv) autogen.sh

- There are references to autogen.sh in the instructions. This is only 
required for building from SVN trunk, since configure is generated as 
part of the tarball release. And I think autogen.sh is removed from the 
release tarballs too.


v) sudo

- I don't think the use of sudo makes things any clearer for beginners 
since it isn't installed on all systems by default. For example, it's 
not on any of my Fedora default virtual installs, or my normal desktop 
workstation (I wonder if these instructions were written for Ubuntu?). I 
think it would end up confusing people even more, rather than helping 
them...



ATB,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland
Sirius Corporation - The Open Source Experts
http://www.siriusit.co.uk
T: +44 870 608 0063