I was building BerkeleyDB (4.7, yes I know, there are more recent versions available) on a Solaris machine. First try was to unpack, cd into the directory, run configure. It failed, there is no configure script. Bah. 🙁
Second try: searching for docs… found some… in HTML (the README refers to it and tells nothing else). This is a remote machine, I do not want to use a HTML browser remotely (I may not even have one installed there…). Bah. 🙁
Ok, dist/configure exists, no special options needed for my case, it seems.
There is even a Solaris specific HTML file, but from a quick glance at it with ‘less’, it looks like a FAQ.
Usability from a command line: zero.
Possibility to compile from a GUI (unix): I doubt it.
What is wrong with plain text files? If I download the source and want to compile it (and for Solaris this is the normal way of working), why the hell do I need some GUI instead of getting a plain text file with the required description (which is not graphically enhanced in the HTML version either)? You can even generate a plain text version of the docs automatically during the src-packaging process.
Hey Oracle, there is room for improvement here!