[postgis-devel] Updated SVN documentation

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 13:26 -0400, Obe, Regina wrote:
Mark,
>
> I made some changes based on your input.  Feel free to correct anywhere
I went wrong.
> Admittedly I'm very new to Linux and a lot of commands are still cryptic
to me.  A lot of the instructions I curled from the PostGIS thread.
>
> http://postgis.refractions.net/pipermail/postgis-users/2008-August/020746.html
>
> And I liked them - whether right or wrong - because they required very
little thought on my part, didn't require searching the web to figure
out where do I get geos, or proj or whatever
> and of course they worked for me :).
>

Well, the standard mantra for Unix-based OS for installation is simply:

	./configure
	make
	make install

And with the current layout, I find that information extremely difficult
to locate. Part of the motivation for improving the build system in SVN
trunk is to improve the detection of libraries and headers to make things
friendlier for new users, and you should find if you remove packages that
it should be reasonably obvious if there is a problem with your
installation; for this reason I feel section 2 is now no longer necessary.

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.

My inclination would be to keep the focus of the the installation just on
PostGIS, but to include the extra detail somewhere within the wiki. It
would then be possible to maintain different versions for each
distribution as required, and users can add extra detail themselves if
they feel it is needed.

> I'm still in a bit of disagreement of the hard-coding of links to
dependencies.
>
> On the one hand I see your point, but on the other hand - my thinking is
the relationship between the proj, postgis, and geos camps is very close
that we can easily correct any links that are broken and people can
easily do a google to find a broken link or submit a bug to complain.
>
> I think the convenience of having the link right there and ability to
copy and paste is useful and the statement that - for x version of
PostGIS, these are the preferred versions of these packages to use.
>

The documentation clearly states the minimum version requirements at the
beginning and version detection is now covered by the build system. If you
try and run configure against an older version of PostgreSQL, PROJ, or
GEOS, you will get a very clear message telling you that you need to
upgrade. I don't see that preferred package versions make much sense, as
generally people will either use the latest package available for their
distribution or download the latest stable source from the relevant
project website.


ATB,

Mark.

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