I did not install postgresql, so why do I have postgresql related binaries in 12.04?

Question

I am going to compile postgresql from source, but the system already has postgresql related binaries such as pg_config, which gives me a lot of environment variables etc when I run it. I did not install postgresql an I've double checked from software manager. Why do I have postgresql related files? They lead to problems when I try to develop extensions with the custom compiled version of postgresql since various environment variables have already been configured.

Answer 1

Probably some other installed package depends upon postgresql, so the binaries got pulled in. You can run

apt-cache rdepends postgresql

to see all the reverse dependencies.