[postgis-devel] Making SFCGAL mandatory

[Bas Couwenberg]

On 2018-11-12 12:35, Sandro Santilli wrote:
> 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).

It doesn't solve anything.

When SFCGAL breaks again, packagers will just add --without-sfcgal to 
their postgis builds, instead of dropping --with-sfcgal.

Kind Regards,

Bas