[postgis-devel] Updated SVN documentation

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

Obe, Regina wrote:

> Chris and Mark,
>
> I want to apologize for being a bit snippy.  I ran out of my allergy
> pills and these substitute ones are just making me a bit more irritable
> than usual.

Heh no worries. We all have bad days... :)

> I still think we should link to the exact versions we prefer because
> even though I and you and the rest of us in this group can tell by going
> to http://download.osgeo.org/geos/ which is the best version of geos to
> use, I fear many users will not and they will think
>
> hmm - I want to be stable - lets pick a version below the latest which
> would be geos-2.2.3.  One of my clients actually told me as a rule of
> thumb he always picks a version below the latest.
>
> or they would say - hmm I have no clue - I'll just go with the svn
> version and then whine when they get poor performance with the leaky
> prepared geometry in svn branch.  I've seen people do that since I do a
> lot of mentoring.

That's strange, as normally SVN snapshots are well hidden away from
general use?! If you find that packages for your OS aren't available, it's
normally made very clear on the project home page which is the latest
stable version (as opposed to development) and I think it would take quite
some effort to download the wrong thing... ;)

One reason I would prefer this is that if anyone posts a suspected bug on
the list, the first thing we will say is "make sure you have the latest
stable version" before doing anything else - so putting people on the
latest stable version straight away can potentially save more heartache.
Perhaps this is one aspect of open source projects which we need to make
clearer?

> So my sense is if we have instructions we shouldn't leave too much to
> the imagination.  We should link to osgeo downloads as an aside, and a
> power user would know what to do with those choices, but cater the
> documentation to people who are relatively new to Linux and Open source
> GIS. Keep in mind a lot of peoples first experience with linux will be
> with PostGIS.

Ah. I would have to disagree with you slightly, and say that there are
actually two audiences: those who are familiar with Linux, and those who
aren't. I'm not saying that the original documentation didn't need some
improvement for beginners, but at the moment I think we've gone too far
the other way; while the instructions make sense to you, it's very
difficult for me to work out what is happening and find out the
information I need.

Looking over at it again today, I think the changes I would like to see
would be:

- Remove section 2.2.1 part 2 as this is reasonably redundant with autoconf
(I find this confusing as it states that we need to check the versions of
tools listed, but then doesn't state which versions are needed?)

- Move the sections 2.2.1 parts 3/4 about compiling PROJ/GEOS out of the
main instruction flow and put it in a separate section below


Do you think that this would be a reasonable compromise?


ATB,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland
Sirius Corporation - The Open Source Experts
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