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
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.
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