On Thu, 2013-05-09 at 10:11 -0400, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 5/9/13 3:25 AM, Dave Page wrote:
> > BTW - it's always worked fine for us on 64 bit machines with the past
> > few major releases of both PG and Python - are you saying that's pure
> > chance?
>
> It works because ActiveState Python has PIC inside a static library.
> But we have no straightforward way of knowing that (AFAIK), other than
> observing whether the build result crashes or not.
After further digging, it seems to me that their build is not a standard
build. They must be patching in compiler options through the backdoor
somehow. Their config/Makefile has
BASECFLAGS= -fno-strict-aliasing -fPIC
meaning that they compile *everything* with those options. But that's
not something that the standard Python configure script can produce.
Again, reliably detecting that might be difficult.