[postgis-devel] postgis extension sans raster (only for folks who can't compile with raster support) - PSC Vote and developer/packager comments please

[Greg Troxel]

From my viewpoint (as a packager), it causes problems to have something
with a particular name be different.  Lots of upstream distributions
have a notion of optional components and configure differently depending
on whether other packages are present.  This is only really useful for
people compiling by hand.  For a package, the packager has to decide
what is required and what isn't, and express a dependency on the
required packages, which forces them to be built/installed first.  Then,
anything else that happens to be installed is either hidden by the
packaging system or configured off, to get a reproducible build.

Having options forces the packager to make a decision whether to include
them or not.  The question is about whether everyone should incur the
pain of the dependency, how useful the feature is, and how hard it is to
get it separately.  (pkgsrc does have the notion of options, but binary
package users get the defaults.)

I don't see that requiring gdal is all that big a deal, given that we
are already depending on geos and postgresql.  If there is an issue, it
may be best addressed by having people packaging gdal splitting off some
of the things that cause it to get really big.  (How many people out
there are using postgis, but not doing enough other random geo stuff to
not have gdal anyway?)  In pkgsrc I have just made gdal a non-optional
dependency of postgis, and I am not even considerating changing it.

So, from my point of view, postgis needs to decide if raster is part of
postgis, or a separate option.  If it's part of postgis, then gdal
becomes a non-optional part of the build.  If it's not part of postgis,
then it should be somehow buildable separately (assuming postgis is
already installed, probably) so it can be a separate package.

I would find it awkward to have two things named postgis that do and
don't have raster.  So if raster is to be split, I would take the pain
now and use the extension name postgis_raster or something, and let
postgis be the non-raster version.

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