Building Slony-I 1.2.12 on Fedora 7 against PostgreSQL 8.2.5 as shipped. Build log entries: Wed Dec 5 18:09:30 MST 2007 Configure of slony fails, configure: error: Your version of libpq doesn't have PQunescapeBytea this means that your version of PostgreSQL is lower than 7.3 and thus not supported by Slony-I. I believe this is because configure thinks it found libpq in /usr/lib, but since the PostgreSQL we're running is the x86_64 version it should be looking in /usr/lib64. Let's see if we can force that. Should be able to use --with-pglibdir=/usr/lib64 with configure, but doesn't seem to work. We know the symbol is in there: cd /usr/lib64 nm -D libpq.so.5 | grep PQunescapeBytea 00000033d680af00 T PQunescapeBytea Wed Dec 5 19:38:31 MST 2007 Ok, here's the deal. configure is looking for that symbol by compiling a little program that calls for it, and checking if the compile succeeds. On the gcc command line it uses -lpq to search for the library. On our Fedora 7, the default behavior is to build x86_64 (64-bit) programs, which means the configuration test program should be linked against the libraries in /usr/lib64 instead of /usr/lib. The linker tries to do that, looking for "/usr/lib64/libpq.so", but that doesn't exist. There is a libpq.so.5 and a libpq.so.5.0. I believe the Fedora postgresql-libs.x86_64 package is missing a symlink /usr/lib64/libpq.so -> libpq.so.5.0 We prove it by extracting the conftest.c program configure generated from the config.log, compiling it (gcc -c conftest.c) and then linking it using the path to the library rather than -lpq (gcc -o conftest conftest.o /usr/lib64/libpq.so.5.0). That works. So the error message is misleading. The compile of the test program failed because the linker couldn't find the right library, not because the library didn't contain the needed routine. Adding the symlink, running configure again. Success. Slony developers should know (add to FAQ?) and whomever builds the postgresql-libs.x86_64 yum package should add the creation of the symlink.
Will add to FAQ.
Added documentation to FAQ.