Re: Speed up clean meson builds by ~25%

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> If this is the consensus opinion, then
> https://commitfest.postgresql.org/48/4914/ should be marked Rejected.
> However, while I think the improvements that Tom was able to make here
> sound fantastic, I don't understand why that's an argument against
> Jelte's patches. After all, Tom's work will only go into v18, but this
> patch could be adopted in v17 and back-patched to all releases that
> support meson builds, saving oodles of compile time for as long as
> those releases are supported. The most obvious beneficiary of that
> course of action would seem to be Tom himself, since he back-patches
> more fixes than anybody, last I checked, but it'd be also be useful to
> get slightly quicker results from the buildfarm and slightly quicker
> results for anyone using CI on back-branches and for other hackers who
> are looking to back-patch bug fixes. I don't quite understand why we
> want to throw those potential benefits out the window just because we
> have a better fix for the future.

As I mentioned upthread, I'm more worried about confusing error
reports than the machine time. It would save me personally exactly
nada, since (a) I usually develop with gcc not clang, (b) when
I do use clang it's not a heavily-affected version, and (c) since
we *very* seldom change the grammar in stable branches, ccache will
hide the problem pretty effectively anyway in the back branches.

(If you're not using ccache, please don't complain about build time.)

I grant that there are people who are more affected, but still, I'd
just as soon not contort the build rules for a temporary problem.

regards, tom lane