pkg-config

[Regina Obe]

> That's not a theory; it's a normative statement.  I find that people
(their orgs) are
> willing to pay places like redhat for LTS and then expect volunteers to
pick up the
> pieces and mitigate the consequences of that decision.  I am not ok with
that
> situation.
> 

I have no sympathy for those either, but I do have sympathy for the people
underneath those people.
Those people under those bureaucrats.  But anyway we could argue this point
probably not
worth wasting breathe on. It's a bad situation all around.


> > Sure they'd like a new GEOS especially if it has improvements they are
> > looking to take advantage of, but OS upgrades are scary and database
> > upgrades are scary too (why we support like 4-5 versions of PostgreSQL
> > on each PostGIS version)
> 
> Sure, but if someone can install a new postgis, they can install a new
geos first.
> Arguably if someone is running LTS because they want all that LTS
goodness,
> they will have a policy against putting packages not from the LTS in the
LTS-
> managed path (probably /usr if GNU/Linux) and then the new postgis would
be
> compiled with --prefix=/usr/new or some such, and it's easy enough to put
geos
> in that prefix first.
> 
Compiling geos is not hard.  Compiling postgis is given all the dependencies
we have.
So people try to avoid the pain by getting PostGIS from third party cause
the LTS version is often too old.

The fact geos is considered a system library / similar to GDAL is what makes
it tough.
Those libs are held as a sacred thing not to be touched cause messing with
them might break 100s of important things you don't know about.
PostGIS on the other hand is not quite so sacred, because no application
depends directly on the postgis libs.
So people are allowed to get PostGIS from somewhere else and many of those
somewhere elses, are building the PostGIS dependencies 
off of the LTS packages, relegating GEOS and GDAL to be picked up there.