Re: Still a few flaws in configure's default CFLAGS selection

Jan Wieck wrote:
> >> >> > What Peter was advocating in that thread was that we enable -g by
> >> >> > default *when building with gcc*.  I have no problem with that, since
> >> >> > there is (allegedly) no performance penalty for -g with gcc.  However,
> >> >> > the actual present behavior of our configure script is to default to -g
> >> >> > for every compiler, and I think that that is a big mistake.  On most
> >> >> > non-gcc compilers, -g disables optimizations, which is way too high a
> >> >> > price to pay for production use.
> >> >> 
> >> >> You do realize that as of now, -g is the default for gcc?  Was that the
> >> >> intent?
> >> > 
> >> > I was going to ask that myself.  It seems strange to include -g by default ---
> >> > we have --enable-debug, and that should control -g on all platforms.
> >> 
> >> Could it be that there ought to be a difference between the defaults of 
> >> a devel CVS tree, a BETA tarball and a final "production" release?
> > 
> > I am afraid that adds too much confusion to the debug situation.  We
> > have a flag to do -g;  let people use it if they want it.
> > 
> 
> Well, -g eats up some disk space, but for a gcc it doesn't need CPU 
> cycles or anything else. I doubt many people who pay the horrible 
> storage capacity overhead for PostgreSQL are that concerned about some 
> extra symbols stored with their binaries, but let's not argue about that 
> one.

Well, people are stripping the executable, so some of them must care. 
In fact, if we enable -g by default for gcc, how do compile with default
symbols?  We would need another configure option.  Strip is not the same
as default symbols.

> The other compiler flags like -O are much more important because the out 
> of the box configuration is the one we're allways blamed for. If it's 
> too hard to teach autoconf the difference between gcc and non-gcc, then 
> rip it.

Sure, we can do it, but it is a question of consistency.

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