This is necessary for ActivePerl 5.18 onwards and for Strawberry Perl.
It is not sufficient for 32-bit builds with newer Visual Studio; these
fail with error LINK2026. Back-patch to 9.3 (all supported versions).
Reported by Victor Wagner.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20160326154321.7754ab8f@wagner.wagner.home
Commit 3c163a7fc's original choice to ignore all #define symbols whose
names begin with underscore turns out to be too simplistic. On Windows,
some Perl installations are built with -D_USE_32BIT_TIME_T, and we must
absorb that or we get the wrong result for sizeof(PerlInterpreter).
This effectively re-reverts commit ef58b87df, which injected that symbol
in a hacky way, making it apply to all of Postgres not just PL/Perl.
More significantly, it did so on *all* 32-bit Windows builds, even when
the Perl build to be used did not select this option; so that it fails
to work properly with some newer Perl builds.
By making this change, we would be introducing an ABI break in 32-bit
Windows builds; but fortunately we have not used type time_t in any
exported Postgres APIs in a long time. So it should be OK, both for
PL/Perl itself and for third-party extensions, if an extension library
is built with a different _USE_32BIT_TIME_T setting than the core code.
Patch by me, based on research by Ashutosh Sharma and Robert Haas.
Back-patch to all supported branches, as commit 3c163a7fc was.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CANFyU97OVQ3+Mzfmt3MhuUm5NwPU=-FtbNH5Eb7nZL9ua8=rcA@mail.gmail.com
Peter Eisentraut noted that commit 40b9f1921 had broken a configure
behavior that some people might rely on: AC_CHECK_PROGS(FOO,...) will
allow the search to be overridden by specifying a value for FOO on
configure's command line or in its environment, but AC_PATH_PROGS(FOO,...)
accepts such an override only if it's an absolute path. We had worked
around that behavior for some, but not all, of the pre-existing uses
of AC_PATH_PROGS by just skipping the macro altogether when FOO is
already set. Let's standardize on that workaround for all uses of
AC_PATH_PROGS, new and pre-existing, by wrapping AC_PATH_PROGS in a
new macro PGAC_PATH_PROGS. While at it, fix a deficiency of the old
workaround code by making sure we report the setting to configure's log.
Eventually I'd like to improve PGAC_PATH_PROGS so that it converts
non-absolute override inputs to absolute form, eg "PYTHON=python3"
becomes, say, PYTHON = /usr/bin/python3. But that will take some
nontrivial coding so it doesn't seem like a thing to do in late beta.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/90a92a7d-938e-507a-3bd7-ecd2b4004689@2ndquadrant.com
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.
Noah Misch
Tom Lane
Andrew Dunstan
Magnus Hagander
Bruce Momjian
PostgreSQL Daemon
Peter Eisentraut