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
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.
This means we can now construct a configure test for the library
presence. Previously these parameters were only figured out at
build time in plperl's GnuMakefile.
versions < 5.8. Also, if there's no Perl, emit a warning informing the
user that he won't be able to build from a CVS pull. This is exactly the
same treatment we give Bison and Perl, and for the same reasons.
perl_embed_ldflags setting. On OS X it seems that ExtUtils::Embed is
trying to force a universal binary to be built, but you need to specify
that a lot further upstream if you want Postgres built that way; the only
result of including -arch in perl_embed_ldflags is some warnings at the
plperl.so link step. Per my complaint and Jan Otto's suggestion.
Tom Lane
Andrew Dunstan
Magnus Hagander
Bruce Momjian
PostgreSQL Daemon
Peter Eisentraut