Re: PostgreSQL and libtool

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 10:48:53PM +0100, Adam wrote:
> I would like to remove libtool as a building tool for PostgreSQL.
> 
> Arguments:
> 
> 1. Libtool is not supported by PostgreSQL. Patching PostgreSQL to use libtool 
> is a hack and maintaining the package is a headache.

So is maintaining different linker rules.

> 2. With libtool, there are problems with other packages, like PostGIS.
> 3. Without libtool, shared libraries are built just fine. We have other 
> packages with shared libraries built without libtool (textproc/icu comes to 
> mind).

I consider the latter more a bug and we have enough packages where the
native build system is completely wrong for anything but Linux...

> 4. On Mac OS X, PostgreSQL crashes when built with libtool (see PR/44365). I 
> guess other platforms might suffer, too.

So we get the real reason. We have a platform that is known to behave
differently depending on a number of factors. We don't even try to debug
the problem, we just completely change the environment. Very
convincing...

Joerg