postgis.control not installed without raster support

[springmeyer]

Apologies if I am misunderstanding something, however I'm seeing that:

• postgis.control needs to be installed into share/postgresql/extension/ in order to be able to run psql template_postgis -c "CREATE EXTENSION postgis;" without an error.
• and postgis.conrol is only installed if postgis raster support is enabled.

This seems very odd to me: you should be able to use PostGIS without gdal support built in without the CREATE EXTENSION postgis; function broken. Right? Or am I missing something obvious? I think this is the root of the confusion behind ​https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/issues/33566 (basically homebrew can't figure out how to package working postgis install as a binary because they likely did not build the binary with raster support).

It looks like this has been like this for a while: ​https://github.com/postgis/postgis/commit/75eea67e6ec68fdd2de1819e7064d998183cf4a8. Would it be feasible to still install postgis.control without needing raster support?

See also #2356 which may be related

[pramsey]

In short, "no". At 2.0 we made the decision that PostGIS included raster, and that therefor to "install postgis" meant to "install postgis with raster". So the extension framework assumes a fully functional, raster-included postgis. Might have been a mistake, but at this point it is a long-standing one.

[robe]

Dane,

As Paul said, we decided that a while ago just before 2.0 was released to making building with CREATE EXTENSION support require raster.

You can still install postgis using the old fashioned script approach just not CREATE EXTENSION. These still get installed in contrib. Part of the reason for that decision was that raster is growing in popularity and GDAL seemed like something we'd eventually want to leverage in the rest of PostGIS proper. For example (even though it's Paul's cool side project, the ogr_fdw ​https://github.com/pramsey/pgsql-ogr-fdw requires GDAL), and since most PostGIS distributions are required to have raster now to get CREATE EXTENSION — the pgsql-ogr-fdw inclusion will be a no-brainer.

My personal reason — I wanted to force all the package maintainers to carry it and knew by forcing the CREATE EXTENSION (which everyone wanted) into there it would be more likely to happen. This for the most part worked. E.g. PGDG (Both Yum and Apt) and so does PostgresApp. I believe FreeBSD does too. So does Amazon RDS, OpenShift and list goes on. Sorry for being so sneaky about that. In hindsight I thought since GDAL was easy to package in windows, it should be a breeze on Linux and Mac. I hadn't counted on the difficulties people had doing that. Most of that is water under the bridge now I hope.