I've just finished (yeah, just 20 minutes ago) a complete test in which I managed to force-build postgres in BSD type socket interface, passing both its own test suite and DBD::Pg's test suite.

In another window, I am writing a mail to the postgres developers explaining what I did, why is is hard to do so, and some suggestions in how they could ease up the build chain to accommodate these changes.

The basic (postgres) problem seems to lie in a fix that was explicitly added to make socket communication work on PA-RISC, which is not valid (anymore) on IA64.