Re: NetBSD vs libxml2

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Sat, Aug 11, 2018 at 1:18 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> We could fix this by teaching configure to absorb -Wl,-R... switches
>> into LDFLAGS from xml2-config's output, and that seems to make things
>> work, but I wonder whether we should or not. This seems like a new height
>> of unfriendliness to non-default packages on NetBSD's part, and it's a bit
>> hard to believe the behavior will make it to a formal release.

> I kind of agree with Nico: why do we think we get to tell operating
> system distributions which switches they're allowed to need to make
> things work? The point of things like pg_config and xmlconfig is to
> reveal what is needed. If we editorialize on that, we do so at our
> own risk.

Well, the issue is that new kinds of switches introduce new potential
for bugs. In the case of -Wl,-R..., I'm not even sure that you can
write that more than once per link, so absorbing one from xml2-config
might well break things on some platforms. Or, if you can write more
than one, we'd need to make sure they end up in a desirable order.
(cf commit dddfc4cb2 which fixed similar issues for -L switches;
it looks to me like the current coding would in fact fail to order
our $(rpath) correctly against one absorbed from xml2, and it would
not be trivial to fix that.)

I'm not, personally, eager to do that work for a requirement which
somehow hasn't surfaced on any other platform, nor on any previous
NetBSD release. I think NetBSD is way out in left field here.

regards, tom lane