[Pkg-postgresql-public] Bug#794103: please support cross compilation using libpq-dev as a build-dependency

[Peter Eisentraut]

On 7/30/15 10:31 AM, Helmut Grohne wrote:
>  * Do not use pg_config at all. Use pkg-config instead.
>    + pkg-config nicely supports cross compilation (for autotools based
>      projects) out of the box (assuming that #759556 gets fixed).
>    - pkg-config does not work for Windows and thus does not work for
>      PostgreSQL upstream. In particular, the documentation will keep
>      referring to pg_config. So reverse Build-Depends would need to
>      support both pkg-config (for Debian) and pg_config (for Windows).
>    - (Consequence:) Many packages need patches.

A sane libpq-using package would give the user some kind of choice or
check in sequence some combination of:

- use pkg-config
- use pg_config
- rely on default paths

A package that insists on using pg_config is not only broken for
cross-compilation, but also for multi-arch.  So those packages should be
fixed.