Re: Building on S390

Michael Meskes <meskes@postgresql.org> writes:
> I spend some time trying to figure out why PostgreSQL builds on
> S390-Linux, but Postgres-XC doesn't. Well at least this holds for the Debian
> packages. So far I haven't figured it out.  However, it appears to me that the
> build should fail for both. I'm not an S390 expert by any means, but I was told
> that S390 requires -fPIC and the build failure in the Debian package of XC came
> from a stray -fpic that was used together with -fPIC. But alas the PostgreSQL
> build has both as well.

I think this is probably nonsense.  I spent ten years maintaining Postgres
for Red Hat, and I never saw any such failure on s390 in their packages.
If -fpic weren't good enough for shared libraries on s390, how'd any of
those builds get through their regression tests?

It may well be that *mixing* -fpic and -fPIC is a bad idea, but I'd say
that points to an error in something XC is doing, because the core
Postgres build doesn't use -fPIC anywhere for Linux/s390, AFAICS.
Furthermore, if we change that convention now, we're going to increase
the risk of such mixing failures for other people.
        regards, tom lane