Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson

Hi Andres,

> Not having a ninja backend etc didn't strike me as great either - the builds
> with scons I've done weren't fast at all.

I must admit, personally I never used Scons, I just know that it was considered
(an / the only?) alternative to CMake for many years. The Scons 4.3.0 release
notes say that Ninja is supported [1], but according to the user guide [2]
Ninja support is considered experimental.

Don't get me wrong, I don't insist on using Scons. I was just curious if it was
considered. Actually, a friend of mine pointed out that the fact that Scons
build files are literally a Python code could be a disadvantage. There is less
control of this code, basically it can do anything. It could complicate the
diagnosis of certain issues, etc.

Since you invested so much effort into Meson already let's just focus on it.

I tried the branch on GitHub on MacOS Monterey 12.3.1 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
I was going to test it against several third party extensions, but it looks like
it is a bit early for this. On Ubuntu I got the following error:

```
../src/include/parser/kwlist.h:332:25: error: ‘PARAMETER’ undeclared here (not
in a function)
332 | PG_KEYWORD("parameter", PARAMETER, UNRESERVED_KEYWORD, BARE_LABEL)

../src/interfaces/ecpg/preproc/keywords.c:32:55: note: in definition of macro
‘PG_KEYWORD’
32 | #define PG_KEYWORD(kwname, value, category, collabel) value,
```

On MacOS I got multiple errors regarding LDAP:

```
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/
LDAP.framework/Headers/ldap.h:1:10: error: #include nested too deeply
#include <ldap.h>

../src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c:4816:2: error: use of undeclared
identifier 'LDAP'
LDAP *ld = NULL;
^

../src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c:4817:2: error: use of undeclared
identifier 'LDAPMessage'
LDAPMessage *res,
^
... etc...
```

I didn't invest much time into investigating these issues. For now I just
wanted to report them. Please let me know if you need any help with these
and/or additional information.

[1]: https://scons.org/scons-430-is-available.html
[2]: https://scons.org/doc/production/PDF/scons-user.pdf

--
Best regards,
Aleksander Alekseev