[postgis-devel] A letter to the Postgis Developers and Packagers

[lr at pcorp.us]

>> If we could have an option so that PostGIS has it's own version of
liblwgeom with a versioning scheme that matches the rest of PostGIS,
with an optional switch to spit out another baby with it's own
versioning that others can use, then the two can coexist using the same
code base
>> And that code base be PostGIS.

> Had you not considered the option of PostGIS dynamically linking to
> the new external library ? It would be like the GEOS dependency.

Yes we've done that and it does not work. It creates chaos with liblwgeom
sometimes not getting installed along side PostGIS.

GEOS is a pain but a palpable pain because it was designed from the ground
up to be a shared library.  liblwgeom as  shared library is an
after-thought.  While some after-thoughts work fine, in this case I don't
think so because we are too in-grained into thinking that is part of
PostGIS (the part we can test outside of the database). That I don't
envision changing anytime soon and will slow our release cycle.


>> That probably doesn't help Debian folks all that much except that
>> liblwgeom so names won't change with each new micro release of PostGIS,
>> but they'd still have to maintain 2 for largely identical libraries.

> I guess the PostGIS version would not need to be an exported library
> anymore, if the external one exists.

> --strk;

Yes it should not be exported, it shouldn't need to be exported.