[postgis-devel] Death to PGXS

[Markus Wanner]

On 12/07/2014 06:15 PM, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> FWIW Debian do a slightly interesting thing from memory which is where
> they supplied a "cut down" version of the PostgreSQL Makefile and
> pg_config with a lot of things missing. Installing the postgresql-dev
> pacakge then brings in the "complete" Makefile and pg_config (plus other
> build-time dependencies) which can be used to build extensions/modules
> as normal.

It's not so much that Debian wanted to "cut down", but add a wrapper to
allow installation of multiple Postgres major versions in parallel. A
lot of extensions now use pg_buildext to build against multiple major
versions.

However, I think that's unrelated to whether or not an individual major
version build uses pgxs.

> The slightly annoying part here is that it's difficult to tell the
> difference from a "cut down" pg_config and a "development" pg_config as
> normally the existence of pg_config itself should indicate that a full
> build environment is available...

Well, yeah, on Debian, pg_config is a wrapper. However, AFAIR the
postgresql-server-dev-all package depends at least one Postgres major
version's -dev package, so I'd be surprised to see pg_config, but no
build environment at all.

I don't think there's a similar wrapper or "cut down" version of
pgxs.mk, though.

Regards

Markus Wanner
(maintainer of PostGIS for Debian & PgAPT)