Hi, On 2024-06-24 09:44:57 +0100, Dave Page wrote: > To address Andres' concerns around mis-detection of dependencies, or other > oddities such as required compiler flags not being included, I would > suggest that a) that's happened very rarely, if ever, in the past, and b) > we can always spit out an obvious warning if we've not been able to use > cmake or pkgconfig for any particular dependencies.
I personally spent quite a few days hunting down issues related to this. Not because I wanted to, but because it was causing breakage and nobody else was looking. For several years postgres didn't build against a modern perl, for example, see the stuff leading up to http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=ccc59a83cd97 but nobody seemed to care for a prolonged amount of time. We have evidence of random build hackery all over the tree - often entirely outdated, sometimes even *breaking* builds these days ([1]): https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/interfaces/libpq/Makefile#L80-L88 (wrong library names for kerberos on 64bit systems, wrong ssl libnames for ) https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/contrib/bool_plperl/Makefile#L30 https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/pl/plpython/Makefile#L59-L72 https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/pl/tcl/Makefile#L35-L51 https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/config/python.m4#L62-L64x There's plenty more, some of the more complicated cases are a bit less trivial to search for. Greetings, Andres Freund [1] https://postgr.es/m/CAGPVpCSKS9E0An4%3De7ZDnme%2By%3DWOcQFJYJegKO8kE9%3Dgh8NJKQ%40mail.gmail.com