Rant about Berke­ley­DB docs

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!