Re: [HACKERS] building libpq.a static library

On 12 July 2017 at 16:11, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Jeroen Ooms <jeroen@berkeley.edu> writes:
>
>> This works but it's a bit of a pain to maintain. I was wondering if
>> this hack could be merged so that the standard 'configure
>> --enable-static' script would install a static library for libpq
>> alongside the shared one.
>
> FWIW, we used to have support for building static libpq, but
> we got rid of it a long time ago.  I couldn't find the exact
> spot in some desultory trawling of the commit history.

Fwiw I think the real problem is that building static libraries
"properly" requires different compiler options -- notably they're not
normally built with -fPIC. So that means building every object twice
which kind of breaks make's build model which has a simple dependency
graph where each object appears once. Some packages do this by
inventing a foo-shared.o and foo-static.o but that introduces its own
weirdness.

I don't know what the downsides would be of creating a static library
out of objects built with -fPIC. It might just be a small performance
penalty which might be no big deal for libpq. That may be a good
compromise.

-- 
greg