Re: [HACKERS] make install fails in perl5 ...

"Thomas G. Lockhart" <lockhart(at)alumni(dot)caltech(dot)edu> writes:
> I think you are headed in this direction, but istm that the --with-xxx
> flags on configure should work for any package at any time. So someone
> doing an installation can look at the "./configure --help" output and
> say "I think I want those", and actually have it do the right thing,
> stopping before it does the wrong thing.

Right, my thoughts exactly. A reasonable person seeing the --with-perl
configure option would assume that he wants to use it, if he has Perl.
As things stand, if he's following the recommended install procedure
he probably can't use it. That's wrong.

> I should be able to override the "--with" settings from configure with
> my Makefile.custom, so I can reinstall the entire Postgres package just
> by copying Makefile.custom and rerunning configure without major command
> line parameters.

Well, that should be true as long as you also get the subsidiary
information that configure computes (locations of tclsh and friends, in
the Tcl case). It is legitimate for configure to compute those because
they are config info --- what if you have more than one version of Tcl
installed? You need to be able to specify which one to use.

We have two problems here:

1. Makefile.global ought to make clear which other settings need to be
made if you want to turn on USE_TCL/USE_TK. This is just
documentation.

2. Setting those other settings in Makefile.custom ought to be
sufficient. It is not, right now, because configure writes the
values into non-makefiles that will not notice what you did in
Makefile.custom. This is fixable but I am leery of trying to fix it
for 6.4.

I suggest that at this late stage we ought to concentrate on making
sure that the standard configure/install procedure works smoothly.
It's too late to worry about whether people's existing Makefile.custom
will work smoothly --- and I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect a
Makefile.custom to work just because it worked with some prior version,
anyway.

> I suspect that the tcl/tk stuff doesn't quite work this way at the
> moment, and that the perl stuff needs a bit of adjustment also. I'll
> look at the ODBC stuff to get it in line if it isn't already.

I'm not touching ODBC :-).

regards, tom lane