Re: Which header and lib files to use when compiling libpq-code?

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 10:51:45AM -0400, Kynn Jones wrote:
> I need to compile some code that uses libpq.  For this I need to determine
> the directories to use for the header and library files.
>
> The machine I'm using has multiple copies of the files libpq-fe.h and
> libpq.a.  How can I determine which one of all these copies are the ones
> that correspond to the Pg server that is currently running on this system?
>  (FWIW, the OS here is Ubuntu Linux.)

In general you don't need to match the server version, the protocol

hasn't changed much in a while so as long as it's less than a few years
old it'll work.

> I tried the naive approach of using the "newest" versions of these files, as
> measured by their modification times.  This produced disastrous results.
>  The code compiled, but resulted in a program that failed in bizarre and
> unpredictable ways, which strongly hinted at one or more silent segmentation
> violations in the C code.  I conjectured that this was the result of a
> mismatched header or library file.  Sure enough, the bizarre failures
> disappeared when I used a different set of header and library files.

Given you're using Ubuntu, why not just install postgresql-dev and use
/usr/include/postgresql.