Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson

On 12.10.21 10:37, Andres Freund wrote:
> For the last year or so I've on and off tinkered with $subject. I think
> it's in a state worth sharing now. First, let's look at a little
> comparison.

I played with $subject a few years ago and liked it. I think, like you
said, meson is the best way forward. I support this project.

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.