Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson -v9

Hi

On 2022-07-06 11:03:31 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 01.07.22 11:33, Andres Freund wrote:
> > Attached is an updated version of the meson patchset. There has been a steady
> > stream of incremental work over the last month, with patches from Peter
> > Eisentraut and Nazir Yavuz.
> >
> > I tried to address the review comments Peter had downthread about the prep
> > patches. The one that I know is still outstanding is that there's still
> > different ways of passing output directories as parameters to a bunch of
> > scripts added, will resolve that next (some have been fixed).
>
> Here is my rough assessment of where we are with this patch set:
>
> 08b4330ded prereq: deal with \ paths in basebackup_to_shell tests.
>
> This still needs clarification, per my previous review.

Hm. I thought I had explained that bit, but apparently not. Well, it's pretty
simple - without this, the test fail on windows for me, as soon as one of the
binaries is in a directory with spaces (which is common on windows). Iimagine
what happens with e.g.
qq{$gzip --fast > "$escaped_backup_path\\\\%f.gz"}
if $gzip contains spaces.

This doesn't happen currently on CI because nothing runs these tests on
windows yet.

> bda6a45bae meson: prereq: Refactor PG_TEST_EXTRA logic in autoconf build
>
> I understand the intention behind this, but I think it changes the
> behavior in an undesirable way. Before this patch, you can go into
> src/test/ssl/ and run make check manually. This was indeed the only
> way to do it before PG_TEST_EXTRA. With this patch, this would now
> skip all the tests unless you set PG_TEST_EXTRA, even if you run the
> specific test directly.

It's not a free lunch, I agree. But I think the downsides outweigh the upsides
by far. Not seeing that tests were skipped in the test output is quite
problematic imo. And with meson's testrunner we're going to need something
that deals with skipping these tests - and it's more important to have them
skipped, so that they show up in the test summary.

It's not like it's hard to set PG_TEST_EXTRA for a single command invocation?

> 243f99da38 wip: split TESTDIR into two.
>
> This one has already caused a bit of confusion, but the explanation at
>
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20220601211112.td2ato4wjqf7afnv%40alap3.anarazel.de#1f250dee73cf0da29a6d2c020c3bde08
>
> seems reasonable. But it clearly needs further work.

Yea. I kind of want to get some of the preparatory stuff out of the way first.

> 88dd280835 meson: Add meson based buildsystem.
> 1ee3073a3c meson: ci: Build both with meson and as before.
>
> These are for later. ;-)
>
> In the meantime, also of interest to this effort:
>
> - If we're planning to remove the postmaster symlink in PG16, maybe we
> should start a discussion on that.

Yea.

> - This patch is for unifying the list of languages in NLS, as
> previously discussed: https://commitfest.postgresql.org/38/3737/

There seems little downside to doing so, so ...

Greetings,

Andres Freund