Horton

Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson

Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>

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From: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2021-10-12T13:30:57Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
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.

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