Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson

From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de>, "pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org" <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson
Date: 2021-10-12 15:00:14
Message-ID: CA+Tgmoa-pqZ0eXf3t5oGiu6n78JkoDqkwSr7JLCuSTTJRJu4CA@mail.gmail.com
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On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 9:31 AM Peter Eisentraut
<peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> One problem I noticed back then was that some choices that we currently
> determine ourselves in configure or the makefiles are hardcoded in
> meson. For example, at the time, gcc on macOS was not supported. Meson
> thought, if you are on macOS, you are surely using the Apple compiler,
> and it supports these options. Fixing that required patches deep in the
> bowels of the meson source code (and, in practice, waiting for a new
> release etc.). I strongly suspect this isn't the only such problem.
> For example, the shared library build behavior has been carefully tuned
> in opinionated ways. With the autotools chain, one can override
> anything with enough violence; so we have always felt free to do that.
> I haven't followed it in a while, so I don't know what the situation is
> now; but it is a concern, because we have always felt free to try new
> and unusual build tools (Sun compiler, Intel compiler,
> clang-when-it-was-new) early without waiting for anyone else.

I think we're going to need some solution to this problem. We have too
many people here with strong opinions about questions like this for me
to feel good about the idea that we're going to collectively be OK
with leaving these sorts of decisions up to some other project.

From my point of view, the time it takes to run configure is annoying,
but the build time is pretty fine. On my system, configure takes about
33 seconds, and a full rebuild with 'make -j8' takes 14.5 seconds (I
am using ccache). Moreover, most of the time when I run make, I'm only
doing a partial rebuild, so it's near-instantaneous.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com

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