Hey all, Just thought I would bump this thread given Benjamin has been the only one to request the feature thus far. It was nice to bump into this thread when I was evaluating client-side builds in December myself.
We'd be interested in a stripped down libpq as well; a couple of our embedded Linux platforms built in Buildroot include PostgreSQL, and it accounts for roughly 15% and 20% of our firmware bundles respectively - one of the taller nails in the BSPs. Both of these platforms are only ever clients! With autoconf it is trivial to get a client-side version only - just 4 make commands do the trick. As part of upgrading BSPs I considered adding an internal Buildroot package relying on this, given it's a good opportunity to go through smoke testing and see it not break anything, but I currently do not want to increase the maintenance burden in moving BSPs forward. I'm also not particularly keen on adding a dependency on autoconf/make given it's only been said it won't be dropped in the near future - I don't particularly want some developer here in 5 years' time to have to tear their hair out! Having this problem solved externally would be great, though I more than understand the need to balance resources. Best, Jaroslaw Ciba ________________________________ From: Benjamin Leff <[email protected]> Sent: 03 December 2025 20:16 To: Andres Freund <[email protected]> Cc: Tom Lane <[email protected]>; Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Client-only Meson Build From Sources You don't often get email from [email protected]. Learn why this is important<https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification> Building only a subset of libraries / binaries would be sufficient for our use case (and even only building a subset of the tree would get us most of the way there). A configure-time switch to only build client binaries would be ideal but perhaps that could be a long term goal. In our fork we tried to remove anything that wasn't relevant for having a functioning client. If this group is open to it, maybe we could figure out how to approach the low hanging fruit first. Best, Benjamin On Wed, Oct 22, 2025 at 4:02 AM Andres Freund <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi, On 2025-10-21 12:02:27 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > Benjamin Leff <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> > writes: > >> I believe the prevailing opinion was that the amount > >> of time saved by not building all of PG didn't justify the maintenance > >> effort to keep the build scripts working for that case > > > IMO, it’s not just about time. For bare bones package managers when there’s > > no need to build the server, this saves a few GB. > > It's still fundamentally about trading off machine resources versus > people time, though, and that tradeoff is not getting more attractive. The impact really depends on what we define a client-only build as. It'd not be hard at all to add a meta target that just builds a subset of the tree. It'd be slightly harder, but still not that hard, to add a target to install just a subset of libraries / binaries. What would be a bit harder would be to add a configure-time switch to only build client binaries. Mainly because, I think, it'd increase the test matrix more than a dedicated build target would. Benjamin, what precisely are you looking for with a client-only build? Greetings, Andres Freund [ltp|17647911066367886]
