Re: ODBC configure

> The standalone build is broken at least for 7.0. I see that at some
> point you tried to get the top-level configure to invoke odbc's
> configure recursively to have a "distribution in the distribution".
> That is definitely the right way to do it if you want to keep the
> dichotomy. Somehow it seems that it didn't work for you, but at least
> it does work for me. Maybe we should re-enable that?

Your call. But afaik the "distro in the distro" technique does not allow
for a separate package, without requiring a lot of duplication in the
configure script at both levels.

> Btw., do you recall what the separate packaging was intended for?

The separate packaging was intended to address the point that, for some
apps, the *only* package needed to access a remote Postgres database was
the ODBC driver itself. So we wanted a way to build and install it
without requiring any other parts of Postgres to be installed.

At the time, I didn't have a *strong* feeling that this was essential,
but others suggested that it was.

Frankly, istm that the same kind of person who would want to build a
standalone ODBC driver might also be running a system for which RPMs or
some other packaging system is available, so perhaps we should back away
from the standalone capability on Unix systems. The small grey area in
users' knowledge and capabilities between "can build and install from
the source distro" to "needs a pre-built package" may be more trouble
than it is worth.

- Thomas