← 1.0.0 scope SAPE-5

Install path and quickstart: zero to a running database, measured by somebody who did not write it

Status
To do
Component
docs
Priority
High — this is the page that decides whether a stranger gets as far as an opinion
Blocked by
SAPE-3
Blocks
—

Description

Write the install-and-quickstart page: how to get the binary or the image, how to start a daemon, how to reach it, and how to get to a first operation that returns something. It is one linear path with no branches for people who already know the product, and every command on it has been run.

Why now

Category three, unambiguously: without this a stranger cannot run the thing. The README is written for someone reading the source — it explains the parts and how they are tested — and that is a different document with a different reader.

Measured 2026-09-20. packages/sapedb/README.md has seven top-level sections: sapedb, What it is not, What is here, The parts, briefly, Running it, How this is tested, The shared fixtures. There is no Install and no Quickstart. Running it begins at README.md:136 and leads to the Makefile, whose every target runs docker run --rm -v "$(PWD)":/src -w /src golang:1.24-alpine go … — so the documented path to running sapedb starts by mounting the source tree into a Go compiler.

Acceptance criteria

  1. The person who runs the measurement is not the person who wrote the page. This is the criterion; the rest are the shape of it.
  2. The machine has no Go toolchain and no checkout of this repository. Verified before starting, by running go version and getting a failure.
  3. Following only the page, they get a daemon running, declare an operation against it, and invoke it, receiving a result. All three steps, not just the first.
  4. Every place they had to guess, ask, or look elsewhere is written down. The page is not done while that list is non-empty; the list being empty is the pass condition.
  5. The commands on the page were run as written, and their output on the page is the output they produced. No abbreviated transcripts, no output typed from memory.

Out of scope