[postgis-devel] Updated SVN documentation

[Obe, Regina]

Mark,

Rather than reverting,  I was thinking of updating and removing the
stuff we don't agree with would be better.  Note I haven't touched the
1.3 which I think is what most people will be looking at anyway.

The original instructions as they were - I couldn't even follow so they
didn't seem terribly useful and if they aren't useful to me as a
marginally competent PostGIS user (less competent on Linux), I imagine
others would have trouble following them.

I can take the sudo instructions out.  I was testing on OpenSuse and the
below worked fine and for many installs - I figured people would not
necessarily be logged in as root.
sudo/su - seems like we should at the very least make a note about that.

Yes the autogen.sh stuff you are right, I'll remove and would only
confuse users.

Now about Hard-coded tarball URLS with version numbers - I thought about
this a bit and there are a couple of reasons why I intentionally
hard-coded
1) The way different linux systems package stuff is different - so
certainly can't get into details there without going into some diatribe.
Frankly I don't really trust the versions packaged in - e.g. some have
old geos and so forth and left up to the discretion of what the platform
thinks is stable.  Also I wouldn't want people left to there own devices
mindlessly installing the geos 3.1 which is not stable yet.

2) If you are going to be using your packaging system to install geos,
proj and other stuff - wouldn't you be doing the same for PostGIS? so
you wouldn't even be following these instructions anyway.

Thanks,
Regina


-----------------------------------------------
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
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