The test case that Autoconf uses to discover whether a function has
been declared doesn't work reliably with clang, because clang reports
a warning not an error if the name is a known built-in function.
On some platforms, this results in a lot of compile-time warnings about
strlcpy and related functions not having been declared.
There is a fix for this (by Noah Misch) in the upstream Autoconf sources,
but since they've not made a release in years and show no indication of
doing so anytime soon, let's just absorb their fix directly. We can
revert this when and if we update to a newer Autoconf release.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/26819.1542515567@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.
Back-patch of commit 751f532b9. Buildfarm results indicate that only
icc-on-Linux actually has an issue here; perhaps the lack of field
reports indicates that people don't build PG for production that way.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/10877.1537993279@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.
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
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
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.
Back-patch of commit 751804998. The code known to be affected only exists
in 9.6 and later, but we do have some stuff using int128 in 9.5, so patch
back to 9.5.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171110185747.31519.28038@wrigleys.postgresql.org
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.
Older versions of Python produce garbage (or at least useless) values of
get_config_vars('LDLIBRARY'). Newer versions produce garbage (or at least
useless) values of get_config_vars('SO'), which was defeating our configure
logic that attempted to identify where the Python shlib really is. The net
result, at least with a stock Python 3.5 installation on macOS, was that
we were linking against a static library in the mistaken belief that it was
a shared library. This managed to work, if you count statically absorbing
libpython into plpython.so as working. But it no longer works as of commit
d51924be8, because now we get separate static copies of libpython in
plpython.so and hstore_plpython.so, and those can't interoperate on the
same data. There are some other infelicities like assuming that nobody
ever installs a private version of Python on a macOS machine.
Hence, forget about looking in $python_configdir for the Python shlib;
as far as I can tell no version of Python has ever put one there, and
certainly no currently-supported version does. Also, rather than relying
on get_config_vars('SO'), just try all the possibilities for shlib
extensions. Also, rather than trusting Py_ENABLE_SHARED, believe we've
found a shlib only if it has a recognized extension. Last, explicitly
cope with the possibility that the shlib is really in /usr/lib and
$python_libdir is a red herring --- this is the actual situation on older
macOS, but we were only accidentally working with it.
Discussion: <5300.1475592228@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Using exit() requires stdlib.h, which is not included. Use return
instead. Also add return type for main().
Reviewed-by: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>
Reviewed-by: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com>
We weren't terribly consistent about whether to call Apple's OS "OS X"
or "Mac OS X", and the former is probably confusing to people who aren't
Apple users. Now that Apple has rebranded it "macOS", follow their lead
to establish a consistent naming pattern. Also, avoid the use of the
ancient project name "Darwin", except as the port code name which does not
seem desirable to change. (In short, this patch touches documentation and
comments, but no actual code.)
I didn't touch contrib/start-scripts/osx/, either. I suspect those are
obsolete and due for a rewrite, anyway.
I dithered about whether to apply this edit to old release notes, but
those were responsible for quite a lot of the inconsistencies, so I ended
up changing them too. Anyway, Apple's being ahistorical about this,
so why shouldn't we be?
awk's equality-comparison operator is "==" not "=". We got this right
in many places, but not in configure's checks for supported version
numbers of flex and perl. It hadn't been noticed because unsupported
versions are so old as to be basically extinct in the wild, and because
the only consequence is whether or not a WARNING flies by during
configure.
Daniel Gustafsson noted the problem with respect to the test for flex,
I found the other by reviewing other awk calls.
Previously, we included <xlocale.h> only if necessary to get the definition
of type locale_t. According to notes in PGAC_TYPE_LOCALE_T, this is
important because on some versions of glibc that file supplies an
incompatible declaration of locale_t. (This info may be obsolete, because
on my RHEL6 box that seems to be the *only* definition of locale_t; but
there may still be glibc's in the wild for which it's a live concern.)
It turns out though that on FreeBSD and maybe other BSDen, you can get
locale_t from stdlib.h or locale.h but mbstowcs_l() and friends only from
<xlocale.h>. This was leaving us compiling calls to mbstowcs_l() and
friends with no visible prototype, which causes a warning and could
possibly cause actual trouble, since it's not declared to return int.
Hence, adjust the configure checks so that we'll include <xlocale.h>
either if it's necessary to get type locale_t or if it's necessary to
get a declaration of mbstowcs_l().
Report and patch by Aleksander Alekseev, somewhat whacked around by me.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since we have been using
mbstowcs_l() since 9.1.
Commit e2609323e set the minimum Tcl version we support to 8.4, but
I forgot to adjust the documentation to say the same. Some nosing
around for other consequences found that the configure script could
be simplified slightly as well.
Per buildfarm member anchovy, 2.6.0 exists in the wild now.
Hopefully it works with Postgres; if not, we'll have to do something
about that, but in any case claiming it's "too old" is pretty silly.
This is like BSWAP32, but for 64-bit values. Since we've got two of
them now and they have use cases (like sortsupport) beyond CRCs, move
the definitions to their own header file.
Peter Geoghegan
Remove configure's checks for HAVE_POSIX_SIGNALS, HAVE_SIGPROCMASK, and
HAVE_SIGSETJMP. These APIs are required by the Single Unix Spec v2
(POSIX 1997), which we generally consider to define our minimum required
set of Unix APIs. Moreover, no buildfarm member has reported not having
them since 2012 or before, which means that even if the code is still live
somewhere, it's untested --- and we've made plenty of signal-handling
changes of late. So just take these APIs as given and save the cycles for
configure probes for them.
However, we can't remove as much C code as I'd hoped, because the Windows
port evidently still uses the non-POSIX code paths for signal masking.
Since we're largely emulating these BSD-style APIs for Windows anyway, it
might be a good thing to switch over to POSIX-like notation and thereby
remove a few more #ifdefs. But I'm not in a position to code or test that.
In the meantime, we can at least make things a bit more transparent by
testing for WIN32 explicitly in these places.
With optimizations enabled at least one compiler, clang 3.7, optimized
away the crc intrinsics knowing that the result went on unused and has
no side effects. That can trigger errors in code generation when the
intrinsic is used, as we chose to use the intrinsics without any
additional compiler flag. Return the computed value to prevent that.
With some more pedantic warning flags (-Wold-style-definition) the
configure test failed to recognize the existence of _mm_crc32_u*
intrinsics due to an independent warning in the test because the test
turned on -Werror, but that's not actually needed here.
Discussion: 20150814092039.GH4955@awork2.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.5, where the use of crc intrinsics was integrated.
So far we have worked around the fact that some very old compilers do
not support 'inline' functions by only using inline functions
conditionally (or not at all). Since such compilers are very rare by
now, we have decided to rely on inline functions from 9.6 onwards.
To avoid breaking these old compilers inline is defined away when not
supported. That'll cause "function x defined but not used" type of
warnings, but since nobody develops on such compilers anymore that's
ok.
This change in policy will allow us to more easily employ inline
functions.
I chose to remove code previously conditional on PG_USE_INLINE as it
seemed confusing to have code dependent on a define that's always
defined.
Blacklisting of compilers, like in c53f73879f, now has to be done
differently. A platform template can define PG_FORCE_DISABLE_INLINE to
force inline to be defined empty.
Discussion: 20150701161447.GB30708@awork2.anarazel.de
The current version is adding a spurious -pthread option on some Darwin
systems that don't need it, which leads to a bunch of "unrecognized option
'-pthread'" warnings. There is a proposed fix for that in the upstream
autoconf archive's bug tracker, see https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?8186.
This commit updates our version of ax_pthread.m4 to the "draft2" version
proposed there by Daniel Richard G. I'm using our buildfarm to help Daniel
to test this, before he commits this to the upstream repository.
Per a suggestion from Tom Lane. Back-patch to 9.0 (all supported
versions). While only 9.4 and up have code known to elicit this
compiler bug, we were disabling inlining by accident until commit
43d89a23d5.
Our version was different from the upstream version in that we tried to use
all possible pthread-related flags that the compiler accepts, rather than
just the first one that works. That change was made in commit
e48322a6d6, to work-around a bug affecting GCC
versions 3.2 and below (https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=8888),
although we didn't realize that it was a GCC bug at the time. We hardly care
about that old GCC versions anymore, so we no longer need that workaround.
This fixes the macro for compilers that print warnings with the chosen
flags. That's pretty annoying on its own right, but it also inconspicuously
disabled thread-safety, because we refused to use any pthread-related flags
if the compiler produced warnings. Max Filippov reported that problem when
linking with uClibc and OpenSSL. The warnings-check was added because the
workaround for the GCC bug caused warnings otherwise, so it's no longer
needed either. We can just use the upstream version as is.
If you really want to compile with GCC version 3.2 or older, you can still
work-around it manually by setting PTHREAD_CFLAGS="-pthread -lpthread"
manually on the configure command line.
Backpatch to 9.5. I don't want to unnecessarily rock the boat on stable
branches, but 9.5 seems like fair game.
AC_TRY_COMPILE(...) -> AC_COMPILE_IFELSE([AC_LANG_PROGRAM(...)])
AC_TRY_LINK(...) -> AC_LINK_IFELSE([AC_LANG_PROGRAM(...)])
AC_TRY_RUN(...) -> AC_RUN_IFELSE([AC_LANG_PROGRAM(...)])
AC_LANG_SAVE/RESTORE -> AC_LANG_PUSH/POP
AC_DECL_SYS_SIGLIST -> AC_CHECK_DECLS(...) (per snippet in autoconf manual)
Also use AC_LANG_SOURCE instead of AC_LANG_PROGRAM, where the main()
function is not needed.
With these changes, autoconf -Wall doesn't complain anymore.
Andreas Karlsson
According to recent tests, this case now works fine, so there's no reason
to reject it anymore. (Even if there are still some OpenBSD platforms
in the wild where it doesn't work, removing the check won't break any case
that worked before.)
We can actually remove the entire test that discovers whether libpython
is threaded, since without the OpenBSD case there's no need to know that
at all.
Per report from Davin Potts. Back-patch to all active branches.
By converting to using forward slashes at configure time we avoid
having to repeat the logic anywhere that this is needed, such as
in transforms modules for plpython.
For building PL/Perl, PL/Python, and PL/Tcl, we need a shared library of
libperl, libpython, and libtcl, respectively. Previously, this was
checked in the makefiles, skipping the PL build with a warning if no
shared library was available. Now this is checked in configure, with an
error if no shared library is available.
The previous situation arose because in the olden days, the configure
options --with-perl, --with-python, and --with-tcl controlled whether
frontend interfaces for those languages would be built. The procedural
languages were added later, and shared libraries were often not
available in the beginning. So it was decided skip the builds of the
procedural languages in those cases. The frontend interfaces have since
been removed from the tree, and shared libraries are now available most
of the time, so that setup makes much less sense now.
Also, the new setup allows contrib modules and pgxs users to rely on the
respective PLs being available based on configure flags.
Tom Lane