[postgis-devel] liblwgeom.so

[Sandro Santilli]

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 8:15 PM, Paul Ramsey <pramsey at opengeo.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 2:09 AM, Sandro Santilli <strk at keybit.net> wrote:
>> We could get back to statically linked utilities, but why would we ?
>
> Because we know they work, because the number of potential
> install-time mistakes that can break things goes down, because the
> build chain gets simpler. Why would we not?

I know the "we know it works" argument very well, but you have to draw
a line between stability and innovation. Given we're going 2.0 (how many
things known to work we left already?) it seems a good occasion to move
forward to me.

About mixing static linking and dynamic linking, I left the postgresql
module statically linked to avoid the complexity of pre-installation
testing which would require (for a dynamically linked module) a way to
have the already running PostgreSQL instance
find a yet-to-be-installed library. I'm not sure that's possible at
all. In order to fix that we should rework the tester to at least fire
a completely new instance of postgres (which could actually also fix
other inconsistencies, like the need to be superuser there).
Beside regress testing, a dynamically linked module would also require
postgresql restart after installation (and after the ldconfig call).
I don't see how mixing dynamic and static linking is a problem at the
moment. After all the dynamic libary is versioned after PostGIS and
tightly coupled with the specific release. It's like a convenience
internal library for now.

About taking responsibility for the libpgcommon issue I agree it is on
me. I'm just back from holiday and will be on it. Mark: I asked for
your opinion because I belive it has to do with using or not PGXS, but
I could be wrong. Eventually I'd drop libpgcommon and simply link its
object files into the respective libraries. It's been a mistake on my
side to commit the libpgcommon thing while working on liblwgeom,
raising the warning levels. Sorry for that.

--strk;

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