Re: static or dynamic libpgport

On 11-12-09 11:13 AM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Recently I attempted to build an external package (pg_bulkload) 
> against the latest Fedora packages. Unfortunately this fails, as pgxs 
> adds "-lpgport" to any link line for an executable, and the 
> corresponding libpgport.a isn't there. And in fact, pg_bulkload does 
> use some of the functionality there (e.g. pg_strncasecmp), so just 
> stripping "-lpgport" out doesn't work either.
>
> This happened because Fedora packaging guidelines 
> <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Packaging_Static_Libraries> 
> are strongly against shipping static libraries, and so all the 
> PostgreSQL static libraries are excluded from the distribution (and I 
> believe there are similar restrictions for RHEL). Of these libraries, 
> I believe the only one that is *only* built as a static library is 
> libpgport.
>
> Is there any good reason why we shouldn't build and install a dynamic 
> libpgport.so?

+1

We've struggled with slony and pgport because so many users have had 
problems with pgport not being included in some distributions.  It has 
some useful functions, I think recent versions of slony use it on win32 
but don't elsewhere. Wee have had at least one patch floating around 
that makes conditionally includes  certain small behaviours in slony 
based on if pgport is available or not based on a configure check.

What package would a shared static pgport be installed with? Slony 
requires a server + headers to build but slon and slonik only have a 
runtime dependency on libpq (I don't know if anyone installs slon/slonik 
on a machine without a postgresql server but you could)

Steve



> cheers
>
> andrew
>