Horton

Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>

View thread View on postgr.es
From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2021-11-15T19:23:40Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
Hi,

On 2021-11-15 14:11:25 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> >   One important thing to call out: Meson has support for the AIX linker, but
> >   *not* the xlc compiler. I.e. one has to use gcc (or clang, but I didn't
> >   try). I don't know if we'd require adding support for xlc to meson - xlc is
> >   pretty buggy and it doesn't seem particularly crucial to support such an old
> >   crufty compiler on a platform that's not used to a significant degree?
>
> While I have no particular interest in AIX or xlc specifically, I do
> worry about us becoming a builds-on-gcc-or-workalikes-only project.
> I suppose MSVC provides a little bit of a cross-check, but I don't
> really like giving up on other compilers.  Discounting gcc+clang+MSVC
> leaves just a few buildfarm animals, and the xlc ones are a significant
> part of that population.

Yea, that's a reasonable concern. I wonder if there's some non-mainstream
compiler that actually works on, um, more easily available platforms that we
could utilize.


> (In fact, unless somebody renews fossa/husky's
> icc license, the three xlc animals will be an outright majority of
> them, because wrasse and anole are the only other active animals with
> non-mainstream compilers.)

It should probably be doable to get somebody to run another icc animal. Icc is
supported by meson, fwiw.


> Having said that, I don't plan to be the one trying to get meson
> to add xlc support ...

It'd probably not be too hard. But given that it's quite hard to get access to
AIX + xlc, I'm not sure it's something I want to propose. There's no resources
to run halfway regular tests on that I found...


It's good to make sure we're not growing too reliant on some compiler(s), but
imo only really makes sense if the alternative compilers are meaningfully
available and maintained.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

Commits

  1. meson: Add 'running' test setup, as a replacement for installcheck

  2. meson: Add support for building with precompiled headers

  3. windows: Adjust FD_SETSIZE via commandline define

  4. meson: docs: Add xml{lint,proc} wrapper to collect dependencies

  5. meson: ecpg: Split definition of static and shared libraries

  6. windows: Set UMDF_USING_NTSTATUS globally, include ntstatus.h

  7. ci: Add hint about downloadable logs to README

  8. meson: Set up absolute rpaths to libdir

  9. meson: Include CFLAGS/c_args in summary and pg_config output

  10. windows: remove date from version number in win32ver.rc

  11. meson: Add initial version of meson based build system

  12. ci: windows: set error mode to not include SEM_NOGPFAULTERRORBOX

  13. Refactor PG_TEST_EXTRA logic in autoconf build

  14. Split TESTDIR into TESTLOGDIR and TESTDATADIR

  15. Don't hardcode tmp_check/ as test directory for tap tests

  16. Extend gendef.pl in preparation for meson

  17. Include c.h instead of postgres.h in src/port/*p{read,write}*.c

  18. Remove DLLTOOL, DLLWRAP from configure / Makefile.global.in

  19. Run xmllint validation only once

  20. Bump minimum Perl version to 5.14

  21. Move gramparse.h to src/backend/parser

  22. Run perltidy over Catalog.pm

  23. Parse catalog .dat files as a whole when compiling the backend

  24. Build all Flex files standalone

  25. Move private declarations shared between guc.c and guc-file.l to new header

  26. Preparatory refactoring for compiling guc-file.c standalone

  27. Move darwin sysroot determination into separate file

  28. Fix MSVC warning in compat_informix/rnull.pgc

  29. solaris: Use versioning scripts instead of -Bsymbolic

  30. Change shared library installation naming on macOS

  31. regress: allow to specify directory containing expected files, for ecpg

  32. Don't add HAVE_LDAP_H HAVE_WINLDAP_H to pg_config.h

  33. Refactor dtrace postprocessing make rules

  34. Add output directory option to gen_node_support.pl

  35. Add output directory argument to generate-unicode_norm_table.pl

  36. Add output file argument to generate-errcodes.pl

  37. Add output path arg in generate-lwlocknames.pl

  38. Move snowball_create.sql creation into perl file

  39. ecpg: Output dir, source dir, stamp file argument for preproc/*.pl

  40. psql: Output dir and dependency generation for sql_help

  41. Deal with paths containing \ and spaces in basebackup_to_shell tests

  42. Remove LLVM_CONFIG from Makefile.global.in

  43. Make update-unicode target work in vpath builds

  44. Refactor DLSUFFIX handling

  45. ldap tests: Add paths for openbsd.

  46. ldap tests: Don't run on unsupported operating systems.

  47. Remove check for accept() argument types

  48. Move our p{read,write}v replacements into their own files.

  49. Adjust yywrap macro for non-reentrant scanners for MSVC.

  50. Remove any -arch switches given in ExtUtils::Embed's ldopts from our

  51. Change PL/Perl and Pg interface build to use configured compiler and

  52. Apparently, on some systems, ExtUtils::Embed and MakeMaker are slightly