Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
> I wonder why we have two ways at all (I'm not counting the stuff
> about copying it to contrib because it seems pointless). The other
> day I was looking at orafce code in pgfoundry, and at clearxlogtail
> too IIRC, and they both had the "ifdef USE_PGXS" stuff in the
> Makefile. I wonder why. Why not just rip the "ifdef" line and the
> non-PGXS code, and just use PGXS always?
Well, most of our database servers wind up with multiple builds of
PostgreSQL, and we find it is less error-prone for the non-programmer
DBAs to expand a tarball under such a directory from the normal build
(for the appropriate version) and make it there. There also seemed
some possibility that clearxlogtail would be accepted into the
distribution as a contrib module, so I was trying to have it ready to
go, should that happen.
As an aside, our function for extracting text from a PDF in a bytea
didn't work right when I tried to build it using the PGXS the other
day. I moved the directory into our PostgreSQL build location and
built it the other way and it worked. I haven't tracked down why, but
it leaves me leery of carving out the form which worked for me. (When
you don't really understand something, you resort to superstitious
ritual....)
-Kevin