Re: Meson far from ready on Windows

Hi

On Tue, 25 Jun 2024 at 12:39, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 2024-06-25 11:54:56 +0100, Dave Page wrote:
> > https://github.com/dpage/winpgbuild proves that the hacks above are not
> > required *if* you build the dependencies in the recommended way for use
> > with MSVC++ (where documented), otherwise just native Windows.
>
> Partially it just means that some of the hacks are now located in the
> "build
> dependencies" script.  E.g. you're renaming libintl.dll.a, libiconv.dll.a,
> libuuid.a to something that's expected by the buildmethod. And the scripts
> change the directory structure for several other dependencies (e.g. zstd,
> krb).
>
>
> > If you, for example, build a dependency using Mingw/Msys, then you may
> get
> > different filenames than if you build the same thing using its VC++
> > solution or makefile. That's where most, if not all, of these issues come
> > from.
>
> Yes, that's precisely my point. The set of correct names / flags depends on
> things outside of postgres control. Hence they should be handled outside of
> postgres, not as part of postgres. Particularly because several of the
> dependencies can be built in multiple ways, resulting in multiple library
> names. And it doesn't even just differ by compiler, there's ways to get
> different library names for some of the deps even with the same compiler!
>

Replying to this and your previous email.

I think we're in violent agreement here as to how things *should* be in an
ideal world. The issue for me is that this isn't an ideal world and the
current solution potentially makes it much harder to get a working
PostgreSQL build on Windows - not only that, but everyone doing those
builds potentially has to figure out how to get things to work for
themselves because we're pushing the knowledge outside of our build system.

I've been building Postgres on Windows for years (and like to think I'm
reasonably competent), and despite reading the docs I still ended up
starting multiple threads on the hackers list to try to understand how to
get v17 to build. Would we accept the current Meson setup on Linux if
people had to hand-craft .pc files, or install dependencies using multiple
third-party package managers to get it to work?

As I previously noted, I think we should default to pkgconfig/cmake
detection, but then fall back to what we did previously (with suitably
obnoxious warnings). Then at least a build environment that worked in the
past should work in the future.

-- 
Dave Page
pgAdmin: https://www.pgadmin.org
PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com