[postgis-devel] Death to PGXS

[Greg Troxel]

My $0.02 as the packager for pkgsrc (NetBSD, and also runs on Illumos):

  More terribly, I found a postgresql93 package on freebsd that was
  compiled in an environment apparently without perl, so PGXS defines
  $(PERL) as "/bin/sh
  /usr/local/lib/postgresql/pgxs/src/makefiles/../../config/missing”,
  which doesn’t really help our build at all.

I can see why they did that; when packaging one wants to omit
dependencies.   postgresql93 probably runs fine without perl, as long as
you don't try to use the makefiles.   So, it's really that postgresql
has a hard dependency on perl and it's broken without it, and the
FreeBSD port should probably be fixed.  But the pkgsrc package has the
same problem (perl is a dependency for -plperl), and postgis builds in
the pkgsrc environment.

The issue of forcing the compiler and flags seems messier; forcing
compiler to something non-free certainly seems like a problem.

If postgis were to ditch PGXS (which seems like a reasonable concept),
it would have to reinvent all of that, which to me would seem like not
only the usual auto* but libtool.

Presumably pg_config should be expanded to handle anything postgis needs
that isn't alreayd there.   As a workaround, a makefile that includes
pgxs could be invoked to spit out a variable, letting postgis use info
From pgxs land without buying into the build system.

As a packager, I'm really only interested in the case where both pgsql
and postgis use the same --prefix.   It has always seemed that addons of
any sort get awkward when there are different prefixes.
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