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Comment by leftnode | Hacker News Reader

Building Postgres from source for testing is relatively simple - at least on Ubuntu / Debian.

    useradd --home-dir /home/postgres \
        --create-home --shell /bin/bash \
        --user-group postgres

    apt-get install -y build-essential libkrb5-dev \
        libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev \
        libossp-uuid-dev uuid python-dev \
        libreadline6 libreadline-dev

    ./configure --disable-debug --enable-thread-safety \
        --with-gssapi --with-openssl \
        --with-libxml --with-libxslt \
        --with-ossp-uuid --with-python \
        --without-bonjour

    make world && make install
    sudo su - postgres -c "/usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb -D /home/postgres/cluster -E UTF8"

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> "Relatively simple - at least on Ubuntu / Debian"

I realize we're all professionals here and technical know-how is expected, but nothing about this is "simple". Brings me PTSD of working w/ academics' alphabet soup of "open source" simulation code written in C, Perl and Makefiles.

Build tools have come along away, maybe not with vanilla Postgres installs, but I guess that's what DBAs are paid to know these days.

I honestly don't see what's so hard about the gp's set of instructions. Your grandma doesn't need to install alpha builds of PostgreSQL (though I shouldn't assume, there are some technical grandmas out there ;) ), for 99% of people out there they can use "apt-get" or "yum" or whatever and can wait until the release.

So let's turn this around, how would you like to see builds become easier?

I was cranky earlier, I just want better documentation. Postgres has slowly gotten better about this over the years.

> apt-get install -y build-essential libkrb5-dev ...

This can slightly more easily done using 'apt-get build-dep postgresql-9.4'. That'll also pull in the tools to build the docs, but I'd consider that a good thing.

> make world && make install

You're building world, but not installing it -> make install-world.

Wow, I would have killed to have just that list last weekend. I spent ~4 hours figuring most of it out myself.

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