On 7/31/17 14:55, Tom Lane wrote: >> We use the "PATH" variants when we need a fully qualified name. For >> example, at some point or another, we needed to substitute a fully >> qualified perl binary name into the headers of scripts. > >> If there is no such requirement, then we should use the non-PATH variants. > > Why? That risks failures of various sorts, and you have not stated > any actual benefit of it.
What I wrote is merely a description of the current practice. That practice was in turn developed out of ancient Autoconf standard practices. There are arguments to be made for doing it differently. One major PITA with the AC_PATH_* checks is that you can only override them with environment variables that are full paths; otherwise the environment variables are ignored. For example, currently, running ./configure PYTHON=python3 will result in the PYTHON setting being ignored. Currently, this only affects a small number of variables, but if we expanded that, it would be a pretty significant usability change. -- Peter Eisentraut http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
