> It is my understanding that having them there causes no bloat in the
> binary. No symbols are resolved in those libs.
>>
>> Perhaps not, but the postgres binary then becomes dependent on those
>> libs being available (if they're shared).
> Good point.
Autoconf has a bad habit of putting all libraries that it's asked to
check for into a single LIBS list, which makes it quite painful to avoid
linking all those libs to *every* binary built by the distribution.
I don't see much value in fixing this just for libreadline (and even
less in fixing it by disabling readline support entirely). I think I
recall Peter E. having mentioned that there'd be a better answer in
autoconf 2.50 ... so I'm inclined not to touch the problem until that
comes out.
regards, tom lane