[Hi all! Time for an introduction: I'm just a postgresql user with an
interest for the theory behind it (cs student), so I've started to read
hackers a while back. As the most frequent reason for me being annoyed
about Linux is the Packaging system I just wanted to throw this in
here:]
On Wed, 2002-01-16 at 04:09, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Furthermore, we can conveniently eliminate the problems related to finding
> all the language handlers as shared libraries. Since all languages are
> installed by default we can just link the handlers right into the
> postmaster, for which we don't need shared libraries. That should give a
> great boost to languages that are currently hard to build, i.e., PL/Perl
> and PL/Python. And the build system would become a lot simpler and more
> portable.
A reason against this not addressed by the others: Doing the languages
as shared libraries opened only at runtime enables for more easy
packaging - psotgresql core pkg with optional psql-tcl, psql-perl,...
packages. Linking the libraries in requires packagers to do postgresql,
postgresql-perl, postgresql-tcl, postgresql-perl+tcl etc. packages.
(I don't know exactly if packagers currently use this possibility. It's
been a while since I last installed postgres)
Greets
-- vbi