Re: PostgreSQL and libtool

[Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost>]

Thomas Klausner <wiz%NetBSD.org@localhost> writes:

> On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 03:56:14PM +0300, Aleksej Saushev wrote:
>> Note that our ardent libtool proponents don't care explaining
>> what is or what may be wrong, neither they care fixing obviously
>> libtool-related bugs themselves.
>
> The main point of using libtool in pkgsrc IMHO is that we only have to
> fix libtool once to support all pkgsrc platforms instead of fixing the
> same or similar problems for many supposedly "cross-platform"
> packages.
>
> Of course there might be bugs in libtool itself and they should be
> fixed, but then the fixes propagate to all libtool users instead of us
> having to fix every package separately.

That often works fine; the problem is that the patches to make
PostgreSQL use libtool don't work right; PostgreSQL has its own fairly
complicated shlib spport system and in this case that seems to work
better than our force-libtool approach.  I don't think people are
arguing that pkgsrc swapping in libtool is in general bad, but rather
that in this particular case we're worse off.

Adam is spending a lot of time maintaining PostgreSQL packages, so my
view is that if he wants to not use libtool that's his call.