[postgis-devel] Making SFCGAL mandatory

[Greg Troxel]

"Regina Obe" <lr at pcorp.us> writes:

> The only unfortunate thing I see with it, is unlike raster which is a
> completely separate lib file, it is tangled in with the postgis lib
> when built.  I suspect we can't fix this that the whole backend switch
> thing requires it to be that way.  So that would make it much harder
> for packagers to have a version with and without SFCGAL.

FWIW, it's relatively easy in pkgsrc to have a build option, where the
dependency is added, the --enable-foo is turned on, and the list of
generated files is adjusted.   The problem is that while for any build
from source, this works fine, the real issue is the argument about the
default and thus the distributed binaries.

But it sounds like multiple people think it isn't stable, and therefore:

  we should change the configure logic to default it to off, and when
  it's on, to fail hard if not found

and then all will be as ok as it can be and appropriate.  If sfcgal
achieves stability and regular maintenance, this can of course be
revisted.