[postgis-devel] Death to PGXS

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 06/12/14 18:24, Greg Troxel wrote:

> 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.

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.

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...


ATB,

Mark.