On Fri, Oct 8, 2021 at 11:40 AM Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Thomas Munro <thomas.mu...@gmail.com> writes: > > (Hmm, in hindsight, I don't know why we need "--with-bsd-auth" instead > > of detecting it, but I don't plan to work on that...) > > As far as that goes, I thought we had a policy against auto-detecting > user-visible features. From memory, the rationale goes like "if you > want feature X you should say so, so that the build will fail if we > can't provide it". Thus we make you say something like --with-openssl > even though it wouldn't be particularly hard to auto-detect. Peter E. > can probably advocate more strongly for this approach.
Oh, I see. I was thinking that operating system features were a bit different from "external packages" (the purpose of --with according to the autoconf docs), but that's a bit fuzzy and I see now that it's consistent with our treatment of PAM which is very similar.
