NetBSD-current generates a large number of warnings about "%m" not
being appropriate to use with *printf functions. While that's true
for their native printf, it's surely not true for snprintf.c, so I
think they have misunderstood gcc's definition of the "gnu_printf"
archetype. Nonetheless, choosing "__syslog__" instead silences the
warnings; so teach configure about that.
Since this is only a cosmetic warning issue (and anyway it depends
on previous hacking to be self-consistent), no back-patch.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16785.1539046036@sss.pgh.pa.us
The method we've traditionally used, of redeclaring strerror_r() to
see if the compiler complains of inconsistent declarations, turns out
not to work reliably because some compilers only report a warning,
not an error. Amazingly, this has gone undetected for years, even
though it certainly breaks our detection of whether strerror_r
succeeded.
Let's instead test whether the compiler will take the result of
strerror_r() as a switch() argument. It's possible this won't
work universally either, but it's the best idea I could come up with
on the spur of the moment.
We should probably back-patch this once the dust settles, but
first let's see what the buildfarm thinks of it.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/10877.1537993279@sss.pgh.pa.us
We've spent an awful lot of effort over the years in coping with
platform-specific vagaries of the *printf family of functions. Let's just
forget all that mess and standardize on always using src/port/snprintf.c.
This gets rid of a lot of configure logic, and it will allow a saner
approach to dealing with %m (though actually changing that is left for
a follow-on patch).
Preliminary performance testing suggests that as it stands, snprintf.c is
faster than the native printf functions for some tasks on some platforms,
and slower for other cases. A pending patch will improve that, though
cases with floating-point conversions will doubtless remain slower unless
we want to put a *lot* of effort into that. Still, we've not observed
that *printf is really a performance bottleneck for most workloads, so
I doubt this matters much.
Patch by me, reviewed by Michael Paquier
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2975.1526862605@sss.pgh.pa.us
Apple's latest rearrangements of the system-supplied headers have broken
building of PL/Perl and PL/Tcl. The only practical way to fix PL/Tcl is to
start using the "-isysroot" compiler flag to point to SDK-supplied headers,
as Apple expects. We must also start distinguishing where to find Perl's
headers from where to find its shared library; but that seems like good
cleanup anyway.
Extensions that formerly did something like -I$(perl_archlibexp)/CORE
should now do -I$(perl_includedir)/CORE instead. perl_archlibexp
is still the place to look for libperl.so, though.
If for some reason you don't like the default -isysroot setting, you can
override that by setting PG_SYSROOT in configure's arguments. I don't
currently think people would need to do so, unless maybe for cross-version
build purposes.
In addition, teach configure where to find tclConfig.sh. Our traditional
method of searching $auto_path hasn't worked for the last couple of macOS
releases, and it now seems clear that Apple's not going to change that.
The workaround of manually specifying --with-tclconfig was annoying
already, but Mojave's made it a lot more so because the sysroot path now
has to be included as well. Let's just wire the knowledge into configure
instead. To avoid breaking builds against non-default Tcl installations
(e.g. MacPorts) wherein the $auto_path method probably still works,
arrange to try the additional case only after all else has failed.
Back-patch to all supported versions, since at least the buildfarm
cares about that. The changes are set up to not do anything on macOS
releases that are old enough to not have functional sysroot trees.
Before this commit LLVM 7 was supported, but only if one explicitly
provided LLVM_CONFIG= and CLANG= paths. As LLVM 7 is the first
version that includes our upstreamed debugging and profiling features,
and as debian is planning to default to 7 due to wider architecture
support, it seems good to support auto-detecting that version.
Author: Christoph Berg
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180912124517.GD24584@msg.df7cb.de
Backpatch: 11, where LLVM was introduced
Since commit e1d19c902, buildfarm member gharial has been failing with
symptoms indicating that snprintf sometimes returns -1 for buffer
overrun, even though it passes the added configure check. Some
google research suggests that this happens only in limited cases,
such as when the overrun happens partway through a %d item. Adjust
the configure check to exercise it that way. Since I'm now feeling
more paranoid than I was before, also make the test explicitly verify
that the buffer doesn't get physically overrun.
Since our substitute snprintf now returns a C99-compliant result,
there's no need anymore to have complicated code to cope with pre-C99
behavior. We can just make configure substitute snprintf.c if it finds
that the system snprintf() is pre-C99. (Note: I do not believe that
there are any platforms where this test will trigger that weren't
already being rejected due to our other C99-ish feature requirements for
snprintf. But let's add the check for paranoia's sake.) Then, simplify
the call sites that had logic to cope with the pre-C99 definition.
I also dropped some stuff that was being paranoid about the possibility
of snprintf overrunning the given buffer. The only reports we've ever
heard of that being a problem were for Solaris 7, which is long dead,
and we've sure not heard any reports of these assertions triggering in
a long time. So let's drop that complexity too.
Likewise, drop some code that wasn't trusting snprintf to set errno
when it returns -1. That would be not-per-spec, and again there's
no real reason to believe it is a live issue, especially not for
snprintfs that pass all of configure's feature checks.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/17245.1534289329@sss.pgh.pa.us
This reverts commit 3a60c8ff89. Buildfarm
results show that that caused a whole bunch of new warnings on platforms
where gcc believes the local printf to be non-POSIX-compliant. This
problem outweighs the hypothetical-anyway possibility of getting warnings
for misuse of %m. We could use gnu_printf archetype when we've substituted
src/port/snprintf.c, but that brings us right back to the problem of not
getting warnings for %m.
A possible answer is to attack it in the other direction by insisting
that %m support be included in printf's feature set, but that will take
more investigation. In the meantime, revert the previous change, and
update the comment for PGAC_C_PRINTF_ARCHETYPE to more fully explain
what's going on.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2975.1526862605@sss.pgh.pa.us
The elog/ereport family of functions certainly support the %m format spec,
because they implement it "by hand". But elsewhere we have printf wrappers
that might or might not allow it depending on whether the platform's printf
does. (Most non-glibc versions don't, and notably, src/port/snprintf.c
doesn't.) Hence, rather than using the gnu_printf format archetype
interchangeably for all these functions, use it only for elog/ereport.
This will allow us to get compiler warnings for mistakes like the ones
fixed in commit a13b47a59, at least on platforms where printf doesn't
take %m and gcc is correctly configured to know it. (Unfortunately,
that won't happen on Linux, nor on macOS according to my testing.
It remains to be seen what the buildfarm's gcc-on-Windows animals will
think of this, but we may well have to rely on less-popular platforms
to warn us about unportable code of this kind.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2975.1526862605@sss.pgh.pa.us
During the work of upstreaming my previous patches for gdb and perf
support the API changed. Adapt. Normally this wouldn't necessarily be
something to backpatch, but the previous API wasn't upstream, and at
least the gdb support is quite useful for debugging.
Author: Andres Freund
Backpatch: 11, where LLVM based JIT support was added.
We used to claim to support platforms using 'q' or 'I64' as the printf
length modifier for long long int, by dint of replacing snprintf with
our own code which uses the C99 standard 'll' modifier. But that is
only adequate if we use INT64_MODIFIER only in snprintf-based calls,
not directly with the platform's native printf or fprintf. Which
hasn't been the case for years. We had not noticed, partially because
of inadequate test coverage, and partially because the buildfarm is
almost completely bare of machines that won't take 'll'. The last
one seems to have been frogmouth, which was adjusted recently so that
it will take 'll'. We might as well just give up on the pretense
that anything else works, and save ourselves some configure cycles.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/13103.1526749980@sss.pgh.pa.us
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/24769.1526772680@sss.pgh.pa.us
ARMv8 introduced special CPU instructions for calculating CRC-32C. Use
them, when available, for speed.
Like with the similar Intel CRC instructions, several factors affect
whether the instructions can be used. The compiler intrinsics for them must
be supported by the compiler, and the instructions must be supported by the
target architecture. If the compilation target architecture does not
support the instructions, but adding "-march=armv8-a+crc" makes them
available, then we compile the code with a runtime check to determine if
the host we're running on supports them or not.
For the runtime check, use glibc getauxval() function. Unfortunately,
that's not very portable, but I couldn't find any more portable way to do
it. If getauxval() is not available, the CRC instructions will still be
used if the target architecture supports them without any additional
compiler flags, but the runtime check will not be available.
Original patch by Yuqi Gu, heavily modified by me. Reviewed by Andres
Freund, Thomas Munro.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/HE1PR0801MB1323D171938EABC04FFE7FA9E3110%40HE1PR0801MB1323.eurprd08.prod.outlook.com
We already do this for Perl and some other interesting tools, so it
seems sensible to do it for Python as well, especially since the
sub-release number is never determinable from other configure output
and even the major/minor numbers may not be clear without excavation
in config.log.
While at it, get rid of the code's assumption that both the major and
minor numbers contain exactly one digit. That will foreseeably be
broken by Python 3.10 in perhaps four or five years. That's far enough
out that we probably don't need to back-patch this.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2186.1522681145@sss.pgh.pa.us
LLVM will be used for *optional* Just-in-time compilation
support. This commit just adds the configure infrastructure that
detects LLVM.
No documentation has been added for the --with-llvm flag, that'll be
added after the actual supporting code has been added.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170901064131.tazjxwus3k2w3ybh@alap3.anarazel.de
This is an optional dependency. It'll be used for the upcoming LLVM
based just in time compilation support, which needs to wrap a few LLVM
C++ APIs so they're accessible from C..
For now test for C++ compilers unconditionally, without failing if not
present, to ensure wide buildfarm coverage. If we're bothered by the
additional test times (which are quite short) or verbosity, we can
later make the tests conditional on --with-llvm.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170901064131.tazjxwus3k2w3ybh@alap3.anarazel.de
The new macro allows to test flags for different compilers and to
store them in different CFLAG like variables. The existing
PGAC_PROG_CC_CFLAGS_OPT and PGAC_PROG_CC_VAR_OPT are changed to be
just wrappers around the new function.
This'll be used by the upcoming LLVM support, to separately detect
capabilities used by clang, when generating bitcode.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170901064131.tazjxwus3k2w3ybh@alap3.anarazel.de
On Sparc64, use of __attribute__(aligned(8)) with __int128 causes faulty
code generation in gcc versions at least through 5.5.0. We can work around
that by disabling use of __int128, so teach configure to test for the bug.
This solution doesn't fix things for the case of cross-compiling with a
buggy compiler; to support that nicely, we'd need to add a manual disable
switch. Unless more such cases turn up, it doesn't seem worth the work.
Affected users could always edit pg_config.h manually.
In passing, fix some typos in the existing configure test for __int128.
They're harmless because we only compile that code not run it, but
they're still confusing for anyone looking at it closely.
This is needed in support of commit 751804998, so back-patch to 9.5
as that was.
Marina Polyakova, Victor Wagner, Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/0d3a9fa264cebe1cb9966f37b7c06e86@postgrespro.ru
On some systems the results of 64 bit __builtin_mul_overflow()
operations can be computed at compile time, but not at runtime. The
known cases are arm buildfar animals using clang where the runtime
operation is implemented in a unavailable function.
Try to avoid compile-time computation by using volatile arguments to
__builtin_mul_overflow(). In that case we hopefully will get a link
error when unavailable, similar to what buildfarm animals dangomushi
and gull are reporting.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171213213754.pydkyjs6bt2hvsdb@alap3.anarazel.de
Commit 9fa6f00b1 assumed that __builtin_constant_p("string literal")
is TRUE, if the compiler has that function at all. Buildfarm results
show that Sun Studio 12, at least, breaks that assumption. Removing
that usage would leave us with no mechanical check for a very fragile
coding requirement, so instead teach configure to ignore
__builtin_constant_p() if it doesn't behave that way. We could
complicate matters by distinguishing three cases (no such function,
vs does, vs doesn't work for string literals); but for now, that seems
unnecessary because our other existing uses of this function are just
fairly minor optimizations of non-returning elog/ereport. We can live
without that on the small population of compilers that act this way.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/22997.1513264066@sss.pgh.pa.us
It's not easy to get signed integer overflow checks correct and
fast. Therefore abstract the necessary infrastructure into a common
header providing addition, subtraction and multiplication for 16, 32,
64 bit signed integers.
The new macros aren't yet used, but a followup commit will convert
several open coded overflow checks.
Author: Andres Freund, with some code stolen from Greg Stark
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171024103954.ztmatprlglz3rwke@alap3.anarazel.de
Commits 5a5c2feca3 and
b5178c5d08 introduced support for modern
MSVC-built, 32-bit Perl, but they broke use of MinGW-built, 32-bit Perl
distributions like Strawberry Perl and modern ActivePerl. Perl has no
robust means to report whether it expects a -D_USE_32BIT_TIME_T ABI, so
test this. Back-patch to 9.3 (all supported versions).
The chief alternative was a heuristic of adding -D_USE_32BIT_TIME_T when
$Config{gccversion} is nonempty. That banks on every gcc-built Perl
using the same ABI. gcc could change its default ABI the way MSVC once
did, and one could build Perl with gcc and the non-default ABI.
The GNU make build system could benefit from a similar test, without
which it does not support MSVC-built Perl. For now, just add a comment.
Most users taking the special step of building Perl with MSVC probably
build PostgreSQL with MSVC.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171130041441.GA3161526@rfd.leadboat.com
This is necessary for ActivePerl 5.18 onwards and for Strawberry Perl.
It is not sufficient for 32-bit builds with newer Visual Studio; these
fail with error LINK2026. Back-patch to 9.3 (all supported versions).
Reported by Victor Wagner.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20160326154321.7754ab8f@wagner.wagner.home
Since some preparation work had already been done, the only source
changes left were changing empty-element tags like <xref linkend="foo">
to <xref linkend="foo"/>, and changing the DOCTYPE.
The source files are still named *.sgml, but they are actually XML files
now. Renaming could be considered later.
In the build system, the intermediate step to convert from SGML to XML
is removed. Everything is build straight from the source files again.
The OpenSP (or the old SP) package is no longer needed.
The documentation toolchain instructions are updated and are much
simpler now.
Peter Eisentraut, Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
Our initial work with int128 neglected alignment considerations, an
oversight that came back to bite us in bug #14897 from Vincent Lachenal.
It is unsurprising that int128 might have a 16-byte alignment requirement;
what's slightly more surprising is that even notoriously lax Intel chips
sometimes enforce that.
Raising MAXALIGN seems out of the question: the costs in wasted disk and
memory space would be significant, and there would also be an on-disk
compatibility break. Nor does it seem very practical to try to allow some
data structures to have more-than-MAXALIGN alignment requirement, as we'd
have to push knowledge of that throughout various code that copies data
structures around.
The only way out of the box is to make type int128 conform to the system's
alignment assumptions. Fortunately, gcc supports that via its
__attribute__(aligned()) pragma; and since we don't currently support
int128 on non-gcc-workalike compilers, we shouldn't be losing any platform
support this way.
Although we could have just done pg_attribute_aligned(MAXIMUM_ALIGNOF) and
called it a day, I did a little bit of extra work to make the code more
portable than that: it will also support int128 on compilers without
__attribute__(aligned()), if the native alignment of their 128-bit-int
type is no more than that of int64.
Add a regression test case that exercises the one known instance of the
problem, in parallel aggregation over a bigint column.
This will need to be back-patched, along with the preparatory commit
91aec93e6. But let's see what the buildfarm makes of it first.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171110185747.31519.28038@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Upcoming patches are going to address performance issues that involve
slow system provided ntohs/htons etc. To address that expand
pg_bswap.h to provide pg_ntoh{16,32,64}, pg_hton{16,32,64} and
optimize their respective implementations by using compiler intrinsics
for gcc compatible compilers and msvc. Fall back to manual
implementations using shifts etc otherwise.
Additionally remove multiple evaluation hazards from the existing
BSWAP32/64 macros, by replacing them with inline functions when
necessary. In the course of that the naming scheme is changed to
pg_bswap16/32/64.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170927172019.gheidqy6xvlxb325@alap3.anarazel.de
Commit 3c163a7fc's original choice to ignore all #define symbols whose
names begin with underscore turns out to be too simplistic. On Windows,
some Perl installations are built with -D_USE_32BIT_TIME_T, and we must
absorb that or we get the wrong result for sizeof(PerlInterpreter).
This effectively re-reverts commit ef58b87df, which injected that symbol
in a hacky way, making it apply to all of Postgres not just PL/Perl.
More significantly, it did so on *all* 32-bit Windows builds, even when
the Perl build to be used did not select this option; so that it fails
to work properly with some newer Perl builds.
By making this change, we would be introducing an ABI break in 32-bit
Windows builds; but fortunately we have not used type time_t in any
exported Postgres APIs in a long time. So it should be OK, both for
PL/Perl itself and for third-party extensions, if an extension library
is built with a different _USE_32BIT_TIME_T setting than the core code.
Patch by me, based on research by Ashutosh Sharma and Robert Haas.
Back-patch to all supported branches, as commit 3c163a7fc was.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CANFyU97OVQ3+Mzfmt3MhuUm5NwPU=-FtbNH5Eb7nZL9ua8=rcA@mail.gmail.com
Peter Eisentraut noted that commit 40b9f1921 had broken a configure
behavior that some people might rely on: AC_CHECK_PROGS(FOO,...) will
allow the search to be overridden by specifying a value for FOO on
configure's command line or in its environment, but AC_PATH_PROGS(FOO,...)
accepts such an override only if it's an absolute path. We had worked
around that behavior for some, but not all, of the pre-existing uses
of AC_PATH_PROGS by just skipping the macro altogether when FOO is
already set. Let's standardize on that workaround for all uses of
AC_PATH_PROGS, new and pre-existing, by wrapping AC_PATH_PROGS in a
new macro PGAC_PATH_PROGS. While at it, fix a deficiency of the old
workaround code by making sure we report the setting to configure's log.
Eventually I'd like to improve PGAC_PATH_PROGS so that it converts
non-absolute override inputs to absolute form, eg "PYTHON=python3"
becomes, say, PYTHON = /usr/bin/python3. But that will take some
nontrivial coding so it doesn't seem like a thing to do in late beta.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/90a92a7d-938e-507a-3bd7-ecd2b4004689@2ndquadrant.com
Previously we had a mix of uses of AC_CHECK_PROG[S] and AC_PATH_PROG[S].
The only difference between those macros is that the latter emits the
full path to the program it finds, eg "/usr/bin/prove", whereas the
former emits just "prove". Let's standardize on always emitting the
full path; this is better for documentation of the build, and it might
prevent some types of failures if later build steps are done with
a different PATH setting.
I did not touch the AC_CHECK_PROG[S] calls in ax_pthread.m4 and
ax_prog_perl_modules.m4. There seems no need to make those diverge from
upstream, since we do not record the programs sought by the former, while
the latter's call to AC_CHECK_PROG(PERL,...) will never be reached.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/25937.1501433410@sss.pgh.pa.us
The Perl documentation is very clear that stuff calling libperl should
be built with the compiler switches shown by Perl's $Config{ccflags}.
We'd been ignoring that up to now, and mostly getting away with it,
but recent Perl versions contain ABI compatibility cross-checks that
fail on some builds because of this omission. In particular the
sizeof(PerlInterpreter) can come out different due to some fields being
added or removed; which means we have a live ABI hazard that we'd better
fix rather than continuing to sweep it under the rug.
However, it still seems like a bad idea to just absorb $Config{ccflags}
verbatim. In some environments Perl was built with a different compiler
that doesn't even use the same switch syntax. -D switch syntax is pretty
universal though, and absorbing Perl's -D switches really ought to be
enough to fix the problem.
Furthermore, Perl likes to inject stuff like -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE and
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 into $Config{ccflags}, which affect libc ABIs on
platforms where they're relevant. Adopting those seems dangerous too.
It's unclear whether a build wherein Perl and Postgres have different ideas
of sizeof(off_t) etc would work, or whether anyone would care about making
it work. But it's dead certain that having different stdio ABIs in
core Postgres and PL/Perl will not work; we've seen that movie before.
Therefore, let's also ignore -D switches for symbols beginning with
underscore. The symbols that we actually need to import should be the ones
mentioned in perl.h's PL_bincompat_options stanza, and none of those start
with underscore, so this seems likely to work. (If it turns out not to
work everywhere, we could consider intersecting the symbols mentioned in
PL_bincompat_options with the -D switches. But that will be much more
complicated, so let's try this way first.)
This will need to be back-patched, but first let's see what the
buildfarm makes of it.
Ashutosh Sharma, some adjustments by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CANFyU97OVQ3+Mzfmt3MhuUm5NwPU=-FtbNH5Eb7nZL9ua8=rcA@mail.gmail.com
The TAP tests mostly don't work without IPC::Run, and the reason for
the failure is not immediately obvious from the error messages you get.
So teach configure to reject --enable-tap-tests unless IPC::Run exists.
Mostly this just involves adding ax_prog_perl_modules.m4 from the GNU
autoconf archives.
This was discussed last year, but we held off on the theory that we might
be switching to CMake soon. That's evidently not happening for v10,
so let's absorb this now.
Eugene Kazakov and Michael Paquier
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/56BDDC20.9020506@postgrespro.ru
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAB7nPqRVKG_CR4Dy_AMfE6DXcr6F7ygy2goa2atJU4XkerDRUg@mail.gmail.com
All documentation is now built using XSLT. Remove all references to
Jade, DSSSL, also JadeTex and some other outdated tooling.
For chunked HTML builds, this changes nothing, but removes the
transitional "oldhtml" target. The single-page HTML build is ported
over to XSLT. For PDF builds, this removes the JadeTex builds and moves
the FOP builds in their place.
copyObject() is declared to return void *, which allows easily assigning
the result independent of the input, but it loses all type checking.
If the compiler supports typeof or something similar, cast the result to
the input type. This creates a greater amount of type safety. In some
cases, where the result is assigned to a generic type such as Node * or
Expr *, new casts are now necessary, but in general casts are now
unnecessary in the normal case and indicate that something unusual is
happening.
Reviewed-by: Mark Dilger <hornschnorter@gmail.com>
Add a column collprovider to pg_collation that determines which library
provides the collation data. The existing choices are default and libc,
and this adds an icu choice, which uses the ICU4C library.
The pg_locale_t type is changed to a union that contains the
provider-specific locale handles. Users of locale information are
changed to look into that struct for the appropriate handle to use.
Also add a collversion column that records the version of the collation
when it is created, and check at run time whether it is still the same.
This detects potentially incompatible library upgrades that can corrupt
indexes and other structures. This is currently only supported by
ICU-provided collations.
initdb initializes the default collation set as before from the `locale
-a` output but also adds all available ICU locales with a "-x-icu"
appended.
Currently, ICU-provided collations can only be explicitly named
collations. The global database locales are still always libc-provided.
ICU support is enabled by configure --with-icu.
Reviewed-by: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com>
Reviewed-by: Andreas Karlsson <andreas@proxel.se>
We had some AC_CHECK_HEADER tests that were really wastes of cycles,
because the code proceeded to #include those headers unconditionally
anyway, in all or a large majority of cases. The lack of complaints
shows that those headers are available on every platform of interest,
so we might as well let configure run a bit faster by not probing
those headers at all.
I suspect that some of the tests I left alone are equally useless, but
since all the existing #includes of the remaining headers are properly
guarded, I didn't touch them.
Commit 04aad4018 added this check after the search for a Python shared
library, which seems to me to be a pretty unfriendly ordering. The
search might fail for what are basically version-related reasons, and
in such a case it'd be better to say "your Python is too old" than
"could not find shared library for Python".
There is no specific reason for this right now, but keeping support for
old Python versions around indefinitely increases the maintenance
burden. The oldest supported Python version is now Python 2.4, which is
still shipped in RHEL/CentOS 5 by default.
In configure, add a check for the required Python version and give a
friendly error message for an old version, instead of relying on an
obscure build error later on.
On buildfarm member cockatiel, that library is in /usr/bin.
(Possibly we should look at $PATH on this platform?)
Per off-list report from Andrew Dunstan.
Per discussion with Andrew Dunstan, it seems there are three peculiarities
of the Python installation on MinGW (or at least, of the instance on
buildfarm member frogmouth). First, the library name doesn't contain
"2.7" but just "27". It looks like we can deal with that by consulting
get_config_vars('VERSION') to see whether a dot should be used or not.
Second, the library might be in c:/Windows/System32, analogously to it
possibly being in /usr/lib on Unix-oid platforms. Third, it's apparently
not standard to use the prefix "lib" on the file name. This patch will
accept files with or without "lib", but the first part of that may well
be dead code.
Most Unix-oid platforms provide a symlink "libfoo.so" -> "libfoo.so.n.n"
to allow the linker to resolve a reference "-lfoo" to a version-numbered
shared library. OpenBSD has apparently hacked ld(1) to do this internally,
because there are no such symlinks to be found in their library
directories. Tweak the new code in PGAC_CHECK_PYTHON_EMBED_SETUP to cope.
Per buildfarm member curculio.
Tom Lane