Re: Server Side C programming Environment Set up

Am Donnerstag, 22. April 2004 18:07 schrieb Tom Lane:
> I agree with the suggestion elsewhere in the thread about generalizing
> the contrib Makefile framework to the point that it could be installed
> as part of the -devel RPM, and then used to build user-written backend
> functions.

It seems to me that you are proposing to recreate the same sort of framework
that we have fought for years to get rid of in the cases of Perl, Python, and
others. Some reasons for why this is not a good idea are:

It would restrict users of that framework to use the same compiler that was
used to build PostgreSQL. History shows that this assumptions fails
surprisingly often.

When someone wants to build a glue module between PostgreSQL and some other
largish package (say, Perl, although that one exists already), then whose
framework do you use? Sometimes building outside of these frameworks becomes
extremely difficult.

Without a configuration routine of its own, add-on packages are restricted to
using the information that the main PostgreSQL configuration already
provides. If someone needs to detect or evaluate additional libraries there
is no chance.

I'd be happy to write more documentation, howtos, or scripts and tools that
enable users to set up a proper build system, but I don't think it's our
business to try to write our own build system framework.