Postgres compilation instructions do not work on modern debian or ubuntu

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To: pgsql-docs(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org
Cc: lewis+postgres(at)cowles(dot)uk
Subject: Postgres compilation instructions do not work on modern debian or ubuntu
Date: 2023-12-31 03:10:37
Message-ID: 170399223795.1876501.12582889009268665829@wrigleys.postgresql.org
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Page: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/install-make.html
Description:

Hello, I Hope you've enjoyed a festive period.

Thanks for all your hard work, postgres is amazing. Small suggestion for
installation instructions on debian / ubuntu boxes:

apt install -yqq build-essential libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev flex bison
libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libssl-dev libxml2-utils xsltproc ccache git
libicu-dev pkg-config

works, what is listed misses git, libicu-dev and pkg-config

git may be optional for those downloading from a tarball, but something to
untar would then be required, as would gzip most-likely.

Even with the above, make world and make world-bin and make check, do not
succeed on arm64, so I've no idea if the build is reporting success, but
silently failing (I get return code zero, so it should pass a compile in
CI)

For testing this, I use docker as it's fast-enough to burn down the world
and check my instructions work (see below):

----

Compiling postgres 16

docker run --rm -it ubuntu:22.04
Or
docker run --rm -it debian

Then within container install system-build-dependencies

apt update -yqq
apt install -yqq build-essential libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev flex bison
libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libssl-dev libxml2-utils xsltproc ccache git
libicu-dev pkg-config

Now time to clone Postgres

git clone https://github.com/postgres/postgres.git
cd postgres
git checkout REL_16_1
git checkout -b release/16.1

Now we can build Postgres

./configure
make -j4

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