Re: RHEL 8.0 build

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.

regards, tom lane