Tom Lane wrote:
> PL/Java is bigger than the whole backend?
No, it's not, but the backend is not compiled as position-independent.
> The reason for -fpic vs -fPIC (on the machines where it makes any
> difference at all) is that the former is faster.
I don't doubt that, but out of curiosity, considering that everyone else 
is using libtool, and libtool always uses -fPIC, what kind of impact 
does this *really* have?
> I think the correct answer is for PL/Java to do s/-fpic/-fPIC/ on
> CFLAGS in its Makefile, rather than trying to force the same on
> everything else.
That would certainly work, but is that the kind of interface we want to 
offer?  In the extreme case, a module could end up redefining a great 
deal of the shared library knowledge that it was supposed to not have 
to care about.
-- 
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/