Marko Karppinen writes:
> I'm not aware of any Darwin-specific "workarounds" in the tree
> right now; the only thing close to that is the support for Apple's
> two-level namespaces feature. And while you can argue the relative
> merits of Apple's approach, the reason for its existence isn't
> sloppiness and the support for it that was implemented by Tom
> most certainly isn't a workaround.
PostgreSQL is only part of the deal; in other projects, people have to
fight with different kinds of problems. Let me just point out the broken
precompiler, the namespace level thing (which might be a fine feature, but
the way it was shoved in was not), using zsh as the default "Bourne"
shell, using different file types for loadable modules and linkable shared
libraries, standard system paths with spaces in them, and there may be
more that I don't remember now. In my experience, the whole system just
has been very unpleasant to develop portable software for since the day it
appeared. You're not at fault for that, but please understand that,
considering all this, the last thing I want to spend time on is improving
the user response mechanics for a "don't do that then" problem.
> The fact of the matter is that Mac OS X has about ten million active
> users, and when one of these people is looking for an RDBMS, he's
> gonna go for one that compiles and works great on his system, rather
> worrying if his platform is optimal for running PostgreSQL. Supporting
> this platform well is absolutely crucial to the overall adoption of pg,
> and even if you consider yourself to be above such pedestrian
> concerns, many people who have to make the business case for putting
> money into PostgreSQL development most definitely think otherwise.
Everyone shall be happy if they don't use compiler switches that are known
to create broken code.
--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net
