Re: -fpic vs. -fPIC

Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> > Tom Lane wrote:
> >> The best I have been able to tell is that none of our .so's are anywhere
> >> near large enough to require -fPIC.
>
> > One question would be what happens when it fails? Does it fail visibly
> > so we would hear about it? If so, we can take the risk.
>
> Yes, you'd get a link failure. On the platforms I've seen it on (HPUX
> at least, on an old project with .so's in the dozens-of-megabytes range)
> the error message is pretty specific that you should have used -fPIC.

Great.

In general, I am not sure we are always explicit that taking risks is
contingent on how the user will see a possible failure. For example, if
-fpic generated SELECT query failures randomly, that would be a much
less attractive risk than a link failure.

Risk is a function of both the probability, and the _visibility_ of the
failure.

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