Re: Fixed directory locations in installs

Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> I guess what you are saying is we should have a configure-time option to
>> address configured directories via relative paths from the executable's
>> directory, rather than absolute paths? Seems reasonable ...

> Yep. In fact, why would we not use that by default?

Because it'll be slower. Instead of
/usr/local/pgsql/lib
we'd be using something like
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/../lib
which is not too bad here but would get worse if the directories are not
so close.

But perhaps we can arrange for the path to be simplified down to an
absolute form when it's constructed at backend startup? You'd need a
routine anyway to combine the bindir path (determined by FindExec) with
the relative path provided by configure, so maybe this routine could be
smart about leading ../ in the configure path.

We'd also need to give some thought to pg_config output. I think I
would like to be able to see the relative path computed by configure
as well as the effective actual path ... maybe a switch to specify which
way to print it?

regards, tom lane