[postgis-devel] Making SFCGAL mandatory

[Sandro Santilli]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 12:38:36PM +0100, Bas Couwenberg wrote:
> 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.

I think what Darafei is saying is that right now configuring
with neither `--with-sfcgal` nor `--without-sfcgal` results
in sfcgal defaulting to off instead of on. But I'll leave this
to Darafai. I'll just state I've no objection with it being
on by default.

--strk;