Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> Based on discussion downthread, it seems like what we actually need to
> do is update perl.m4 to extract CCFLAGS. Turns out somebody proposed
> a patch for that back in 2002:
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/Pine.LNX.4.44.0211051045070.16317-200000%40wotan.suse.de
> It seems to need a rebase. :-)
Ah-hah, I *thought* we had considered the question once upon a time.
There were some pretty substantial compatibility concerns raised in that
thread, which is doubtless why it's still like that.
My beef about inter-compiler compatibility (if building PG with a
different compiler from that used for Perl) could probably be addressed by
absorbing only -D switches from the Perl flags. But Peter seemed to feel
that even that could break things, and I worry that he's right for cases
like -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS which affect libc APIs. Usually we'd have made
the same decisions as Perl for that sort of thing, but if we didn't, it's
a mess.
I wonder whether we could adopt some rule like "absorb -D switches
for macros whose names do not begin with an underscore". That's
surely a hack and three-quarters, but it seems safer than just
absorbing everything willy-nilly.
regards, tom lane