enable-rpath in Red Hat builds

I hadn’t noticed until recently that --enable-rpath is passed to configure on Red Hat PostgreSQL builds and inherited by all extensions (via pg_config) on that platform. rpmlint complains about it on several Red Hat variants (well, in fact it _errors_).

Poking around mailing lists and git history, I was able to ascertain that it wasn’t always this way, with some caveats around how plperl and plpython are build on these platforms.

Does anyone have a pointer as to why this was changed for PostgreSQL itself? Or when?

Do extensions need to worry about this? I see some that use e.g. chrpath on binaries, but without understanding the reason PostgreSQL itself uses an rpath-enabled build I didn’t want to add that.

Planning on just filtering this rpmlint error for now, but I am curious for the motivation.

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Jason Petersen
Software Engineer | Citus Data
303.736.9255
jason(at)citusdata(dot)com