Re: Link requirements creep

On 5/18/08, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> I was displeased to discover just now that in a standard RPM build of
> PG 8.3, psql and the other basic client programs pull in libxml2 and
> libxslt; this creates a package dependency that should not be there
> by any stretch of the imagination.

> Thoughts, better ideas?

1. Use -Wl,--as-needed as linker flag. Portability unknown...
Can be autoconfed.

2. Lets have few top-level library dependencies as make variables:

LIBPQ_LDFLAGS (LIBPQ_LIBS?)
LIBPQ_CFLAGS

Same for READLINE, LIBXML2, etc

Maybe also BACKEND_*

Then each component can pick groups as it needs.

Basically the default autoconf style of putting all into LIBS
work well only when you have single program to build. As in
Postgres build-tree we have lots of modules that want different
selection of libraries to link to, this style does not fit.

--
marko