Re: Meson far from ready on Windows

Hi

On Tue, 18 Jun 2024 at 15:38, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 2024-06-18 14:53:53 +0100, Dave Page wrote:
> > My next task was to extend that to support PostgreSQL 17 and beyond,
> which
> > is where I started to run into problems. I've attempted builds using
> Meson
> > with each of the dependencies defined in the old-style config.pl, both
> with
> > and without modifying the INCLUDE/LIBS envvars to include the directories
> > for the dependencies (as was found to work in the previous discussion re
> > zlib):
> >
> > Will not successfully configure at all:
>
> Do you have logs for those failures?
>

Sure - https://developer.pgadmin.org/~dpage/build-logs.zip. Those are all
without any modifications to %LIB% or %INCLUDE%.

> I think it's important to note that Meson largely seems to want to use
> > pkgconfig and cmake to find dependencies. pkgconfig isn't really a thing
> on
> > Windows (it is available, but isn't commonly used), and even cmake would
> > typically rely on finding things in either known installation directories
> > or through lib/include vars.
>
> I am not really following what you mean with the cmake bit here?
>
> You can configure additional places to search for cmake files with
> meson setup --cmake-prefix-path=...
>

None of the dependencies include cmake files for distribution on Windows,
so there are no additional files to tell meson to search for. The same
applies to pkgconfig files, which is why the EDB team had to manually craft
them.

>
>
> > There really aren't standard directories like
> > /usr/lib or /usr/include as we find on unixes, or pkgconfig files for
> > everything.
>
> Yes, and?
>

And that's why we really need to be able to locate headers and libraries
easily by passing paths to meson, as we can't rely on pkgconfig, cmake, or
things being in some standard directory on Windows.

Thanks.

--
Dave Page
pgAdmin: https://www.pgadmin.org
PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com