As a first-time developer I don't know how the released README / INSTALL are generated. So it's quite unintuitive to find the README.git file.
I may expect an entry in README or a BUILD file when I obtain the sources by git clone, while a conventional ./configure && make works so it may be fine.
I don't know why we need a different README.git file and cannot include INSTALL in the source cloned via git, so I cannot make suggestions here because the obvious solution is 'mv README.git INSTALL'.
> On 6 Apr 2023, at 22:13, tison <wander4096@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi Hackers, > > I opened https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=tree and clone the repo. The README file says that I can read the INSTALL file to understand how to build from source. But there is no such file in Git sources. Is it expected? If so, why?
it's very expected, the README.git file contains:
"In a release or snapshot tarball of PostgreSQL, a documentation file named INSTALL will appear in this directory. However, this file is not stored in git and so will not be present if you are using a git checkout."
The INSTALL file was removed in 54d314c93c0baf5d3bd303d206d8ab9f58be1c37 a long time ago.
That being said, maybe README should have wording along the lines of the above since it's now referring to a file which might not exist?
