[postgis-devel] Making SFCGAL mandatory

Sebastiaan Couwenberg sebastic at xs4all.nl
Sun Nov 11 22:56:35 PST 2018


On 11/12/18 7:38 AM, Darafei "Komяpa" Praliaskouski wrote:
> This year Ubuntu Bionic was released without SFCGAL because of build
> failures for last release.
> 
> As a consequence, we can't assume anyone with recent distro will have
> SFCGAL-enabled PostGIS until year 2023, when Bionic is End-Of-Life.

Where "distro" means Ubuntu.

There are more distributions out there with and without sfcgal.

Debian stretch has it, and Debian buster will have it too unless
something breaks sfcgal between now and the freeze in a few months.

> I propose changing PostGIS build so that it requires SFCGAL, but that
> dependency can be switched off by --without-sfcgal, much like it is already
> with raster, so that this story doesn't repeat, or at least there is some
> more visibility of the issue on the packaging side.
> 
> Any objections? :)

Yes!

SFCGAL is too fragile to be a mandatory dependency of PostGIS. It also
lacks upstream development.

Until those issues are resolved, it cannot be a required dependency of
PostGIS unless you want to risk distributions to not ship with postgis
due to CGAL updates breaking SFCGAL again.

If that would affect RedHat/CentOS you have to wait even longer for the
new release to include it again than is the case with Ubuntu LTS releases.

Kind Regards,

Bas

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