Re: [GENERAL] A change in the Debian install

Tom,

* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> (But ... these statements are based on an assumption of out-of-the-
> box Postgres behavior.  I would not exactly put it past the Debian
> packagers to have decided to change this for reasons of their own,
> and their track record of telling us about such decisions is many
> miles south of abysmal.  So you might look at whatever patches
> are in the Debian package to see if there's anything touching
> pgstat.c's socket-setup logic.)

I don't believe this is really a fair assessment.  Maybe at some point
in the distant past, but not today.  Christoph is regularly on this list
contributing to threads regarding packaging, submitting patches of his
own for improvements to PG, and the patches currently included in the
Debian distribution, at least mostly, are for things which really should
be possible to do with configure options, but which we don't provide
today, or things we should just be handling already.

The non-comment/documentation patches include for the Debian PG 9.6
packages are:

50-per-version-dirs.patch
  Use version specific installation directories so that several major
  versions can be installed in parallel.  This includes changing
  pkglibdir and includedir_server.  Those might be able to be set
  through existing configure flags and that's probably something we
  could work with Christoph to do.  There's also a change to pg_config
  which might be a bit more difficult to handle in upstream (related to
  how pg_config ends up in /usr/bin, but that isn't the "right" BINDIR).

51-default-sockets-in-var.patch
  Use /var/run/postgresql/ for the DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR.  We really
  should allow this to be changed in configure.

54-debian-alternatives-for-external-tools.patch
  Use 'sensible-editor' for DEFAULT_EDITOR, and 'pager' for
  DEFAULT_PAGER.  These could also be done through configure switches, I
  would think.

64-pg_upgrade-sockdir
  This is a bit of a curious one, the description is:
  Fix for: connection to database failed: Unix-domain socket path

"/build/buildd-postgresql-9.3_9.3~beta1-1-i386-mHjRUH/postgresql-9.3-9.3~beta1/build/contrib/pg_upgrade/.s.PGSQL.50432"
  is too long (maximum 107 bytes)

  See also: http://lists.debian.org/debian-wb-team/2013/05/msg00015.html

  This basically adds a mechanism to fall back to using /tmp if the
  socket path is too long.  Would probably be good to figure out a
  better way.

filter-debug-prefix-map
  Description: Remove -fdebug-prefix-map=/p/w/d=. from CFLAGS and
  CONFIGURE in pg_config. The embedded path makes the build
  non-reproducible, and the flag is useless for building extensions
  anyway.
  Not sure there's much we can do about this one, but it's also just for
  pg_config.

hurd-sem_init
  Adds -pthread to LIBS and forces POSIX semaphores on hurd.  I'm not
  sure if this is all still required, but if so, it'd probably be ideal
  if we could figure out a way to handle it automatically instead of
  making the Debian packagers have to do it.

In short, there's certainly nothing that touches pgstat.c's socket-setup
logic and almost all of the changes are just changes to #define's to
specify alternative paths or external tools.

I'll start a discussion with Christoph on if we might, already, be able
to remove some of these, and where we might be able to make upstream
changes to remove the need for others.

Thanks!

Stephen