Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson - v13

On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 2:50 PM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> I'm likely the most biased person on this, but for me the reliable incremental
> builds and the readability of the test output are big enough wins that the
> answer is pretty clear... Doesn't hurt that running all tests is faster too.

It's nice that things are much more discoverable now. For example, if
you want to run some random test on its own then you just...do it in
the obvious, discoverable way. It took me about 2 minutes to figure
out how to do that, without reading any documentation.

OTOH doing the same thing with the old autoconf-based build system
requires the user to know the exact magical incantation for Postgres
tests. You just have to know to run the 2 or 3 tests that are
undocumented (or poorly documented) dependencies first. That seems
like an enormous usability improvement, especially for those of us
that haven't been working on Postgres for years.

> time to run all tests (cassert, -Og), in a fully built tree:

> time make -j48 -s -Otarget check-world PROVE_FLAGS='-j4'
> real 1m1.577s
> user 7m32.579s
> sys 2m17.767s

> time meson test
> real 0m42.178s
> user 7m8.533s
> sys 2m17.711s

Sold!

--
Peter Geoghegan