Information regarding the split distribution -------------------------------------------- In the various download directories you will find alongside files with names like postgresql-XXX.tar.gz (where XXX is a version number) smaller files with the names postgresql-base-XXX.tar.gz postgresql-opt-XXX.tar.gz postgresql-docs-XXX.tar.gz postgresql-test-XXX.tar.gz The file named "postgresql-XXX.tar.gz" is the full source distribution. Each of the other four "tarballs" contains a subset of the files from the full distribution, for downloading convenience. If you download all four of them and unpack them into the same directory you will get exactly what you would have gotten had you downloaded the full distribution. The -base package is the only one that is required for successful installation. It contains the server and the essential client interfaces. The -opt package contains all parts whose compilation needs to be enabled explicitly. This includes the C++, JDBC, ODBC, Perl, Python, and Tcl interfaces, as well as multibyte support. The -docs package contains the documentation in HTML format (man pages are in -base) and the documentation sources. You don't need to download this package if you intend to browse the documentation on the web. Finally, the -test package contains the regression test suite. (Note, this scheme is new as of version 7.1RC4. Previous versions used a different, incompatible split where all subpackages were required.)