Re: Meson far from ready on Windows

Hi,

On 2024-06-24 09:44:57 +0100, Dave Page wrote:
> To address Andres' concerns around mis-detection of dependencies, or other
> oddities such as required compiler flags not being included, I would
> suggest that a) that's happened very rarely, if ever, in the past, and b)
> we can always spit out an obvious warning if we've not been able to use
> cmake or pkgconfig for any particular dependencies.

I personally spent quite a few days hunting down issues related to this. Not
because I wanted to, but because it was causing breakage and nobody else was
looking. For several years postgres didn't build against a modern perl, for
example, see the stuff leading up to
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=ccc59a83cd97
but nobody seemed to care for a prolonged amount of time.

We have evidence of random build hackery all over the tree - often
entirely outdated, sometimes even *breaking* builds these days ([1]):

https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/interfaces/libpq/Makefile#L80-L88
(wrong library names for kerberos on 64bit systems, wrong ssl libnames for )

https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/contrib/bool_plperl/Makefile#L30
https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/pl/plpython/Makefile#L59-L72
https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/pl/tcl/Makefile#L35-L51
https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/config/python.m4#L62-L64x

There's plenty more, some of the more complicated cases are a bit less trivial
to search for.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

[1] https://postgr.es/m/CAGPVpCSKS9E0An4%3De7ZDnme%2By%3DWOcQFJYJegKO8kE9%3Dgh8NJKQ%40mail.gmail.com