Hi, I was hacking in making aix work with the meson patchset last night when I noticed this delightful bit:
gmake -C src/interfaces/libpq ... rm -f libpq.a ar crs libpq.a fe-auth-scram.o fe-connect.o fe-exec.o fe-lobj.o fe-misc.o fe-print.o fe-protocol3.o fe-secure.o fe-trace.o legacy-pqsignal.o libpq-events.o pqexpbuffer.o fe-auth.o touch libpq.a ( echo '#! libpq.so.5'; gawk '/^[^#]/ {printf "%s\n",$1}' /home/andres/src/postgres/build-ac/../src/interfaces/libpq/exports.txt ) >libpq.exp gcc -maix64 -Wall -Wmissing-prototypes -Wpointer-arith -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Werror=vla -Wendif-labels -Wmissing-format-attribute -Wimplicit-fallthrough=3 -Wformat-security -fno-strict-aliasing -fwrapv -fexcess-precision=standard -Wno-format-truncation -O2 -pthread -D_REENTRANT -D_THREAD_SAFE -o libpq.so.5 libpq.a -Wl,-bE:libpq.exp -L../../../src/port -L../../../src/common -lpgcommon_shlib -lpgport_shlib -Wl,-bbigtoc -Wl,-blibpath:'/usr/local/pgsql/lib:/usr/lib:/lib' -Wl,-bnoentry -Wl,-H512 -Wl,-bM:SRE -lm rm -f libpq.a ar crs libpq.a libpq.so.5 we first create a static library libpq.a as normal, but then we overwrite it with the special aix way of packing up shared libraries, by packing them up in a static library. That part is correct, it's apparently the easiest way of getting applications to link to shared libraries on AIX (I think the -Wl,-bM:SRE is relevant for ensuring it'll be a dynamic link, rather than a static one). This likely has been going on for approximately forever. Two questions: 1) Do we continue building static libraries for libpq etc? 2) Do we care about static libraries not suriving on AIX? There could also be a race in the buildrules leading to sometimes static libs sometimes shared libs winning, I think. Greetings, Andres Freund