pkg-config

[Paul Ramsey]

Getting a little off-track for postgis-devel, but since I have you
here: how crazy would it be to add pkg-config install options to GEOS
3.8? Pointless because it's almost EOL?

P

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 8:09 PM Regina Obe <lr at pcorp.us> wrote:
>
> > That's not a theory; it's a normative statement.  I find that people
> (their orgs) are
> > willing to pay places like redhat for LTS and then expect volunteers to
> pick up the
> > pieces and mitigate the consequences of that decision.  I am not ok with
> that
> > situation.
> >
>
> I have no sympathy for those either, but I do have sympathy for the people
> underneath those people.
> Those people under those bureaucrats.  But anyway we could argue this point
> probably not
> worth wasting breathe on. It's a bad situation all around.
>
>
> > > Sure they'd like a new GEOS especially if it has improvements they are
> > > looking to take advantage of, but OS upgrades are scary and database
> > > upgrades are scary too (why we support like 4-5 versions of PostgreSQL
> > > on each PostGIS version)
> >
> > Sure, but if someone can install a new postgis, they can install a new
> geos first.
> > Arguably if someone is running LTS because they want all that LTS
> goodness,
> > they will have a policy against putting packages not from the LTS in the
> LTS-
> > managed path (probably /usr if GNU/Linux) and then the new postgis would
> be
> > compiled with --prefix=/usr/new or some such, and it's easy enough to put
> geos
> > in that prefix first.
> >
> Compiling geos is not hard.  Compiling postgis is given all the dependencies
> we have.
> So people try to avoid the pain by getting PostGIS from third party cause
> the LTS version is often too old.
>
> The fact geos is considered a system library / similar to GDAL is what makes
> it tough.
> Those libs are held as a sacred thing not to be touched cause messing with
> them might break 100s of important things you don't know about.
> PostGIS on the other hand is not quite so sacred, because no application
> depends directly on the postgis libs.
> So people are allowed to get PostGIS from somewhere else and many of those
> somewhere elses, are building the PostGIS dependencies
> off of the LTS packages, relegating GEOS and GDAL to be picked up there.
>