[postgis-devel] Updated SVN documentation

[Chris Hodgson]

I think you're both right. If you look at just about any other 
well-documented project out there (eg. postgresql, apache), there will 
be at least two installation documents, and often many how-tos 
documenting "the big picture" including installing other various other 
components to build a complete system. We should likely have the "quick 
start" no-frills install guide which basically includes the ./configure; 
make; make install steps in in addition to listing the pre-req packages 
and any additional steps that postgis requires. Postgresql has this at:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/install-short.html

The "complete" install guide should probably be as Paul suggests.

I'm torn about including URLs to the proj and geos downloads, primarily 
because it then becomes a continual chore to update them ... it seems 
like the sort of thing that belongs in a howto on a wiki more than in 
the core documentation. The postgresql documentation provides only the 
very generic (and long lived) ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ as a reference for 
those looking to download pre-requisite packages. To follow suit, we 
could simply link to http://download.osgeo.org/ which is about 90% of 
the way to linking to the latest packages, without requiring updates 
every time a new version comes out.

It might be worth considering the possibility that people don't want to 
install of these things as root, and possibly don't have postgresql 
installed as root... although I don't think we've seen a lot of people 
who want to do this.

My 2 cents as someone who has installed a lot of software on a lot of 
Linux (and other) boxen over the years.

Chris

Paul Ramsey wrote:
> I think we should include basic installation instructions for Proj4
> and GEOS as part of the PostGIS doco.  They should include the
> relevant URL to get the source, and the simplest step-by-step: "as
> root, ./configure; make; make install".  They should also include the
> fix for the standard Linux "gotcha", which is not having
> /usr/local/lib in /etc/ld.so.conf and running /sbin/ldconfig.
>
> P.
>
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 12:09 PM, Mark Cave-Ayland
> <mark.cave-ayland at siriusit.co.uk> wrote:
>
>   
>> In terms of installation for PROJ/GEOS, it would make more sense to refer
>> people to the relevant installation pages for each project rather than try
>> and encapsulate everything within the one page; for me it just makes
>> things more cluttered. If you look around at other projects such as
>> PostgreSQL, Apache etc. then you can see a similar pattern within the
>> documentation - give the basic installation instructions, and list other
>> dependencies separately in a requirements section.
>>
>>     
> _______________________________________________
> postgis-devel mailing list
> postgis-devel at postgis.refractions.net
> http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-devel
>