Re: RHEL 8.0 build

Hi,

On 2018-11-24 15:49:25 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jeremy Harris <jgh(at)wizmail(dot)org> writes:
> > Trying to set up a buildfarm animal on a RHEL 8.0 (beta) system,
> > the build fails early:
> > ...
> > It appears to be a "configure" script looking for python; and there is
> > no such. You can have python3 or python2 - but neither package install
> > provides a symlink of just "python".
>
> Yeah, some distros are starting to act that way, and I suspect it's
> causing pain for a lot of people.
>
> Currently we are agnostic about which python version to use, so if you
> don't have anything simply named "python", you have to tell configure
> what to use by setting the PYTHON environment variable.
>
> In a buildfarm configuration file this would look something like
>
> # env settings to pass to configure. These settings will only be seen by
> # configure.
> config_env => {
> + PYTHON => "/usr/local/bin/python3",
>
> There's been some preliminary discussion about starting to default to
> python3, but given this project's inherent conservatism, I don't expect
> that to happen for some years yet. In any case, whenever we do pull
> that trigger we'd surely do so only in HEAD not released branches, so
> buildfarm owners will need to deal with the case for years more.

Why don't we probe for python2 in addition to python by default? That
ought to make RHEL 8 work, without making the switch just yet.

Greetings,

Andres Freund