Location

README.md

Summary

Currently, the top-level readme looks something like this:

# THE RUST PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE blah blah boilerplate this readme is for users, not contributors TABLE OF CONTENTS read this if you are a user HERE ARE 500 LINES ABOUT HOW DISTROS SHOULD COMPLE RUSTC FROM SRC IT GOES ON FOR A LONG TIME IT HAS CODE SNIPPETS AND EVERYTHING ``` ./configure ``` LOOK AREN'T THESE CODE SNIPPETS SO INVITING ``` make ``` blah blah licensing 

This makes it really easy for someone to quickly look at the readme, see that it suggests ./configure, and run that locally. Unfortunately, that will be the wrong thing to do for 99% of contributors, because configure sets profile = "dist" at the top. Additionally, it's not really serving actual users of rust, who almost certainly don't want to compile from source (they either want to install from rustup or from their distro).

I suggest moving the vast majority of the README into a separate file, perhaps called INSTALLING_FROM_SOURCE.md, and making the top-level README only contain the sections preceding "Installing from source" and following "Notes". That should make it a lot more clear that it's not intended for either users or devs.

@rustbot label +E-easy +E-help-wanted