Up to now, our distribution tarballs have included a plain-text form
of the installation.sgml chapter. The rationale for that was that a
recipient might not have either ready internet access or HTML-viewing
tools; a theory that seems downright quaint today. Maintaining the
ability to generate this file is not without cost, because it puts
special requirements on installation.sgml that are often overlooked.
Moreover, we are moving in the direction of making our distribution
tarballs be pure git snapshots for traceability/reproducibility
reasons; including generated files doesn't fit into that plan.
Hence, let's just drop INSTALL and remove the infrastructure for
generating it. The top-level README will now recommend visiting
our website to see the installation instructions. As a useful
side-effect, we can get rid of README.git which has provoked
confusion.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20231220114927.faccqqprmuyrzdip@alap3.anarazel.de
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/e07408d9-e5f2-d9fd-5672-f53354e9305e@eisentraut.org
This is more secure, and saves a redirect since we no longer accept
plain HTTP connections on the website.
References in code comments should probably be updated too, but
that doesn't seem to need back-patching, whereas this does.
Also, in the 9.2 branch, remove suggestion that you can get the
source code via FTP, since that service will be shut down soon.
Daniel Gustafsson, with a few additional changes by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/9A2C89A7-0BB8-41A8-B288-8B7BD09D7D44@yesql.se
Providing this information as plain text was doubtless worth the trouble
ten years ago, but it seems likely that hardly anyone reads it in this
format anymore. And the effort required to maintain these files (in the
form of extra-complex markup rules in the relevant parts of the SGML
documentation) is significant. So, let's stop doing that and rely solely
on the other documentation formats.
Per discussion, the plain-text INSTALL instructions might still be worth
their keep, so we continue to generate that file.
Rather than remove HISTORY and src/test/regress/README from distribution
tarballs entirely, replace them with simple stub files that tell the reader
where to find the relevant documentation. This is mainly to avoid possibly
breaking packaging recipes that expect these files to exist.
Back-patch to all supported branches, because simplifying the markup
requirements for release notes won't help much unless we do it in all
branches.
Subject: [PATCHES] Documentation update
This patch updates some of the documentation that comes with the
distribution. The following files are updated:
COPYRIGHT
README
doc/README.flex
doc/README.support
doc/bug.template