Re: Meson far from ready on Windows

Hi,

On 2024-06-25 11:54:56 +0100, Dave Page wrote:
> https://github.com/dpage/winpgbuild proves that the hacks above are not
> required *if* you build the dependencies in the recommended way for use
> with MSVC++ (where documented), otherwise just native Windows.

Partially it just means that some of the hacks are now located in the "build
dependencies" script. E.g. you're renaming libintl.dll.a, libiconv.dll.a,
libuuid.a to something that's expected by the buildmethod. And the scripts
change the directory structure for several other dependencies (e.g. zstd, krb).

> If you, for example, build a dependency using Mingw/Msys, then you may get
> different filenames than if you build the same thing using its VC++
> solution or makefile. That's where most, if not all, of these issues come
> from.

Yes, that's precisely my point. The set of correct names / flags depends on
things outside of postgres control. Hence they should be handled outside of
postgres, not as part of postgres. Particularly because several of the
dependencies can be built in multiple ways, resulting in multiple library
names. And it doesn't even just differ by compiler, there's ways to get
different library names for some of the deps even with the same compiler!

> It's probably worth noting that "back in the day" when most of this stuff
> was built, there was no UCRT32 compiler option, and it really was a
> potential problem to mix VC++ and Mingw compiled binaries so there was a
> heavy focus on making sure everything was designed around the MSVC++ builds
> wherever they existed.

Agreed, this luckily got easier. But it also increased the variety of expected
library names / flags. It's entirely reasonable to build postgres with msvc
against an gcc built ICU or whatnot.

Greetings,

Andres Freund