On Fri, Oct 8, 2021 at 11:40 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> writes:
> > (Hmm, in hindsight, I don't know why we need "--with-bsd-auth" instead
> > of detecting it, but I don't plan to work on that...)
>
> As far as that goes, I thought we had a policy against auto-detecting
> user-visible features. From memory, the rationale goes like "if you
> want feature X you should say so, so that the build will fail if we
> can't provide it". Thus we make you say something like --with-openssl
> even though it wouldn't be particularly hard to auto-detect. Peter E.
> can probably advocate more strongly for this approach.
Oh, I see. I was thinking that operating system features were a bit
different from "external packages" (the purpose of --with according to
the autoconf docs), but that's a bit fuzzy and I see now that it's
consistent with our treatment of PAM which is very similar.
