David E. Wheeler: How To, Example Makefile Updated

I deployed a new version of Manager last week, and it included a major update to the How To. A lot of the changes are narrative: I tried to keep things shorter and more to-the-point. But from a technical point of view, perhaps the most important improvements are in the Makefile example. Thanks to ongoing work by Cédric Villemain, it now tries harder to stay out of your way, while integrating better with PostgreSQL’s own make targets.

The main changes:

• The setting of $EXTENSION and $EXTVERSION is now done by reading the META.JSON file.
• Thanks to the ?= operator, $PG_CONFIG can now be passed as a param as well as an environment variable. That is, you can do PG_CONFIG=/my/pg_config make or make PG_CONFIG=/my/pg_config.
• New targets are defined only after PGXS is loaded, so that targets can be overridden if necessary.
• A new dist target creates a PGXN-ready zip file, assuming that your code is maintained in Git.

Have a look at the resulting diff for semver to get an idea how you might want to update your own Makefiles.