Building only a subset of libraries / binaries would be sufficient for our use case (and even only building a subset of the tree would get us most of the way there).
A configure-time switch to only build client binaries would be ideal but perhaps that could be a long term goal. In our fork we tried to remove anything that wasn't relevant for having a functioning client. If this group is open to it, maybe we could figure out how to approach the low hanging fruit first. Best, Benjamin On Wed, Oct 22, 2025 at 4:02 AM Andres Freund <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > On 2025-10-21 12:02:27 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > > Benjamin Leff <[email protected]> writes: > > >> I believe the prevailing opinion was that the amount > > >> of time saved by not building all of PG didn't justify the maintenance > > >> effort to keep the build scripts working for that case > > > > > IMO, it’s not just about time. For bare bones package managers when > there’s > > > no need to build the server, this saves a few GB. > > > > It's still fundamentally about trading off machine resources versus > > people time, though, and that tradeoff is not getting more attractive. > > The impact really depends on what we define a client-only build as. > > It'd not be hard at all to add a meta target that just builds a subset of > the > tree. It'd be slightly harder, but still not that hard, to add a target to > install just a subset of libraries / binaries. > > What would be a bit harder would be to add a configure-time switch to only > build client binaries. Mainly because, I think, it'd increase the test > matrix > more than a dedicated build target would. > > Benjamin, what precisely are you looking for with a client-only build? > > Greetings, > > Andres Freund > [image: ltp|17647911066367886]
