Re: failing to build preproc.c on solaris with sun studio

On Sat, Aug 06, 2022 at 06:09:27PM -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2022-08-06 17:59:54 -0700, Noah Misch wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 06, 2022 at 05:43:50PM -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
> > > Sure, we can hack around it in some way. But if we need such hackery to
> > > compile postgres with a compiler, what's the point of supporting that
> > > compiler? It's not like sunpro provides with awesome static analysis or such.
> >
> > To have a need to decide that, PostgreSQL would need to grow preproc.o such
> > that it causes 55% higher RAM usage, and the sunpro buildfarm members extant
> > at that time would need to have <= 32 GiB RAM. I give a 15% chance of
> > reaching such conditions, and we don't gain much by deciding in advance. I'd
> > prefer to focus on decisions affecting more-probable outcomes.
>
> My point wasn't about the future - *today* a compile with normal settings
> doesn't work, on a machine with a reasonable amount of ram. Who does it help
> if one person can get postgres to compile with some applied magic - normal
> users won't.

To me, 32G is on the low side of reasonable, and omitting --enable-debug isn't
that magical. (The TMPDIR hack is optional, but I did it to lessen harm to
other users of that shared machine.)

> And it's not a cost free thing to support, e.g. I tried to build because
> solaris with suncc forces me to generate with_gnu_ld when generating a
> compatible Makefile.global for pgxs with meson.

There may be a strong argument along those lines. Let's suppose you were to
write that revoking sunpro support would save four weeks of Andres Freund time
in the meson adoption project. I bet a critical mass of people would like
that trade. That's orthogonal to preproc.o compilation RAM usage.