Re: Meson far from ready on Windows

On Fri, Jun 21, 2024 at 7:21 AM Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:
> My assumption all along was that Meson would replace autoconf etc. before anything happened with MSVC, precisely because that's the type of environment all the Postgres devs work in primarily. Instead we seem to have taken what I think is a flawed approach of entirely replacing the build system on the platform none of the devs use, whilst leaving the new system as an experimental option on the platforms it will have had orders of magnitude more testing.
>
> What makes it worse, is that I don't believe anyone was warned about such a drastic change. Packagers were told about the git archive changes to the tarball generation, but that's it (and we've said before, we can't expect packagers to follow all the activity on -hackers).

I agree that we should have given a heads up to pgsql-packagers. The
fact that that wasn't done is a mistake, and inconsiderate. At the
same time, I don't quite know who should have done that exactly when.
Note that, while I believe Andres is on pgsql-packagers, many
committers are not, and we have no written guidelines anywhere for
what kinds of changes require notifying pgsql-packagers.

Previous threads on this issue:

https://postgr.es/m/ZQzp_VMJcerM1Cs_@paquier.xyz
http://postgr.es/m/20230408191007.7lysd42euafwl74f@awork3.anarazel.de

Note that in the second of these threads, which contemplated removing
MSVC for v16, I actually pointed out that if we went that way, we
needed to notify pgsql-packagers ASAP. But, since we didn't do that,
no email was ever sent to pgsql-packagers about this, or at least not
that I can find. Still, MSVC support was removed more than six months
ago, so even if somebody didn't see any of the pgsql-hackers
discussion about this, there's been a fair amount of time (and a beta)
for someone to notice that their build process isn't working any more.
It seems a bit weird to me to start complaining about this now.

As a practical matter, I don't think MSVC is coming back. The
buildfarm was already changed over to use meson, and it would be
pretty disruptive to try to re-add buildfarm coverage for a
resurrected MSVC on the eve of beta2. I think we should focus on
improving whatever isn't quite right in meson -- plenty of other
people have also complained about various things there, me included --
rather than trying to undo over a year's worth of work by lots of
people to get things on Windows switched over to MSVC.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com