Peter Eisentraut <pete...@gmx.net> writes: > On 1/9/13 11:00 AM, Tom Lane wrote: >> The libperl-dev package, as constituted, doesn't make any sense: it's >> got the symlink which people need, and a very large static (.a) library >> that most people don't need. Even worse, you can't tell without close >> inspection which of those files is actually used by a package that >> requires libperl-dev, and that is something that's important to know.
> The expectation is that if you want to link against libfoo, you install > libfoo-dev, and after that you can uninstall it. What's wrong with that? What's wrong is that it's hard to tell whether the resulting package will contain a reference to the shared library (libperl.so.whatever) or an embedded copy of the static library. As I tried to explain, this is something that a well-run distro will want to be able to control, or at least determine automatically from the package's BuildRequires list (RPM-ism, not sure what Debian's package management stuff calls the equivalent concept). That makes it a bad idea independently of the problem of whether two configure tests are needed rather than one. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers