Re: PL/perl should fail on configure, not make

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> On 1/9/13 11:00 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> The libperl-dev package, as constituted, doesn't make any sense: it's
>> got the symlink which people need, and a very large static (.a) library
>> that most people don't need. Even worse, you can't tell without close
>> inspection which of those files is actually used by a package that
>> requires libperl-dev, and that is something that's important to know.

> The expectation is that if you want to link against libfoo, you install
> libfoo-dev, and after that you can uninstall it. What's wrong with that?

What's wrong is that it's hard to tell whether the resulting package
will contain a reference to the shared library (libperl.so.whatever)
or an embedded copy of the static library. As I tried to explain, this
is something that a well-run distro will want to be able to control,
or at least determine automatically from the package's BuildRequires
list (RPM-ism, not sure what Debian's package management stuff calls the
equivalent concept). That makes it a bad idea independently of the
problem of whether two configure tests are needed rather than one.

regards, tom lane