Postgres compilation instructions do not work on modern debian or ubuntu

Started by PG Bug reporting formover 2 years ago2 messagesdocs
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#1PG Bug reporting form
noreply@postgresql.org

The following documentation comment has been logged on the website:

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

#2Tom Lane
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
In reply to: PG Bug reporting form (#1)
Re: Postgres compilation instructions do not work on modern debian or ubuntu

PG Doc comments form <noreply@postgresql.org> writes:

Page: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/install-make.html
Description:

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

There is nothing in the core PG documentation, either on the page
you cite or anyplace else, that tries to specify exactly what other
packages you might need to build from source on any particular
distribution. We aren't very interested in trying to add such lists,
precisely because they'd be constantly out of date.

You might have found the above list somewhere else, but in that case
you should be reporting the omissions somewhere else than here.

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)

Can't help you on that when you provide no details. PG certainly
does work for many other people on Debian+arm64.

regards, tom lane