Re: Remove distprep

Hi,

On 2023-08-23 12:46:45 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Subject: [PATCH v4] Remove distprep
>
> A PostgreSQL release tarball contains a number of prebuilt files, in
> particular files produced by bison, flex, perl, and well as html and
> man documentation. We have done this consistent with established
> practice at the time to not require these tools for building from a
> tarball. Some of these tools were hard to get, or get the right
> version of, from time to time, and shipping the prebuilt output was a
> convenience to users.
>
> Now this has at least two problems:
>
> One, we have to make the build system(s) work in two modes: Building
> from a git checkout and building from a tarball. This is pretty
> complicated, but it works so far for autoconf/make. It does not
> currently work for meson; you can currently only build with meson from
> a git checkout. Making meson builds work from a tarball seems very
> difficult or impossible. One particular problem is that since meson
> requires a separate build directory, we cannot make the build update
> files like gram.h in the source tree. So if you were to build from a
> tarball and update gram.y, you will have a gram.h in the source tree
> and one in the build tree, but the way things work is that the
> compiler will always use the one in the source tree. So you cannot,
> for example, make any gram.y changes when building from a tarball.
> This seems impossible to fix in a non-horrible way.

I think it might be possible to fix in a non-horrible way, just that the
effort doing so could be much better spent on other things.

It's maybe also worth mentioning that this does *not* work reliably with vpath
make builds either...

> The make maintainer-clean target, whose job it is to remove the
> prebuilt files in addition to what make distclean does, is now just an
> alias to make distprep. (In practice, it is probably obsolete given
> that git clean is available.)

FWIW, I find a "full clean" target useful to be sure that we don't produce
"untracked" build products. Do a full build, then run "full clean", then see
what remains.

> 88 files changed, 169 insertions(+), 409 deletions(-)

It might be worthwhile to split this into a bit smaller chunks, e.g. depending
on perl, bison, flex, and then separately the various makefile bits that are
all over the tree.

Greetings,

Andres Freund