Re: static or dynamic libpgport

On 12/09/2011 01:01 PM, Steve Singer wrote:
> On 11-12-09 11:13 AM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>> Recently I attempted to build an external package (pg_bulkload)
>> against the latest Fedora packages. Unfortunately this fails, as pgxs
>> adds "-lpgport" to any link line for an executable, and the
>> corresponding libpgport.a isn't there. And in fact, pg_bulkload does
>> use some of the functionality there (e.g. pg_strncasecmp), so just
>> stripping "-lpgport" out doesn't work either.
>>
>> This happened because Fedora packaging guidelines
>> <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Packaging_Static_Libraries>
>> are strongly against shipping static libraries, and so all the
>> PostgreSQL static libraries are excluded from the distribution (and I
>> believe there are similar restrictions for RHEL). Of these libraries,
>> I believe the only one that is *only* built as a static library is
>> libpgport.
>>
>> Is there any good reason why we shouldn't build and install a dynamic
>> libpgport.so?
>
> +1
>
> We've struggled with slony and pgport because so many users have had
> problems with pgport not being included in some distributions. It has
> some useful functions, I think recent versions of slony use it on
> win32 but don't elsewhere. Wee have had at least one patch floating
> around that makes conditionally includes certain small behaviours in
> slony based on if pgport is available or not based on a configure check.
>
> What package would a shared static pgport be installed with? Slony
> requires a server + headers to build but slon and slonik only have a
> runtime dependency on libpq (I don't know if anyone installs
> slon/slonik on a machine without a postgresql server but you could)
>
>

In the Fedora world, a static lib would go in postgresql-devel, but a
dynamic lib would go in postgresql-libs, which is also where libpq is
shipped.

cheers

andrew