[postgis-devel] Making SFCGAL mandatory

[Sandro Santilli]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 07:56:35AM +0100, Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
> On 11/12/18 7:38 AM, Darafei "Komяpa" Praliaskouski wrote:

> > 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.

Despite the wording used by Darafei ("mandatory"), his suggestion is
not really making the dependency mandatory, in that it allows
disabling it with a configure switch (--without-sfcgal).

I've no objection to that, as long as the error message ("cannot build")
gives an hint about using --without-sfcgal as a possible solution.

Note that building with SFCGAL doesn't make it mandatory to use SFCGAL
in your database either (you have to explicitly `CREATE EXTENSION
postgis_sfcgal` in order to be affected).

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