Re: Extensions User Design

On Jun 25, 2009, at 7:16 AM, Tom Lane wrote:

>> The problem is, I think, that the Makefile format is way too  
>> flexible.
>
> I think the contrib makefiles are considered to be our standard test
> suite for PGXS.  If a 3rd-party makefile is doing anything not
> represented in contrib, it's not guaranteed to work anyway.  So I'd
> be plenty satisfied if we just made the existing contrib  
> infrastructure
> work for 3rd-party modules.

Is there no platform-independent build system we could take advantage  
of?

One reason the Perl community is (very gradually) moving away from  
ExtUtils::MakMaker towards Module::Build (pure Perl installer) is to  
minimize such issues. I realize that we don't depend on Perl on Unix  
platforms, so it wouldn't make sense to use its build system for our  
extensions, but perhaps there's something else we could do?

Best,

David