Re: pg_preadv() and pg_pwritev() - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

I borrowed my wife's Mac, which is still on Catalina and up to now
never had Xcode on it, and found some very interesting things.

Step 1: download/install Xcode 12.3, open it, agree to license,
wait for it to finish "installing components".

At this point, /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools doesn't exist,
and we have the following outputs from various probe commands:

% xcrun --show-sdk-path
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk
% xcrun --sdk macosx --show-sdk-path
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX11.1.sdk
% xcodebuild -version -sdk macosx Path
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX11.1.sdk

Also, cc -v reports
  -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk

Unsurprisingly, Xcode 12.3 itself only contains

% ls -l /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  5 root  wheel  160 Nov 30 07:27 DriverKit20.2.sdk
drwxr-xr-x  7 root  wheel  224 Nov 30 07:27 MacOSX.sdk
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   10 Jan 14 15:57 MacOSX11.1.sdk -> MacOSX.sdk

Step 2: install command line tools (I used "xcode-select --install"
to fire this off, rather than the Xcode menu item).

Now I have

% ls -l /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs
total 0
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   14 Jan 14 16:42 MacOSX.sdk -> MacOSX11.1.sdk
drwxr-xr-x  8 root  wheel  256 Jul  9  2020 MacOSX10.15.sdk
drwxr-xr-x  7 root  wheel  224 Nov 30 07:33 MacOSX11.1.sdk

which is pretty interesting in itself, because the same directory on
my recently-updated-to-Big-Sur Macs does NOT have the 11.1 SDK.
I wonder what determines which versions get installed here.

More interesting yet:

% xcrun --show-sdk-path
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk
% xcrun --sdk macosx --show-sdk-path
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX11.1.sdk
% xcodebuild -version -sdk macosx Path
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX11.1.sdk

and cc -v reports
  -isysroot /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk

So apparently, "xcrun --show-sdk-path" (without any -sdk option)
is the most authoritative guide to the compiler's default sysroot.

However, googling turns up various people reporting that "xcrun
--show-sdk-path" returns an empty string for them, and our last
major investigation into this [1] found that there are some system
states where the compiler appears to have no default sysroot,
which I bet is the same thing.  I do not at this point have a recipe
to reproduce such a state, but we'd be fools to imagine it's no
longer possible.  My guess about it is that Apple's processes for
updating the default sysroot during system updates are just plain
buggy, with various corner cases that have ill-understood causes.

Also, after re-reading [1] I am not at all excited about trying to
remove the -isysroot switches from our *FLAGS.  What I propose to do
is keep that, but improve our mechanism for choosing a default value
for PG_SYSROOT.  It looks like first trying "xcrun --show-sdk-path",
and falling back to "xcodebuild -version -sdk macosx Path" if that
doesn't yield a valid path, is more likely to give a working build
than relying entirely on xcodebuild.  Maybe there's a case for trying
"xcrun --sdk macosx --show-sdk-path" in between; in my tests that
seemed noticeably faster than invoking xcodebuild, and I've not yet
seen a case where it gave a different answer.

Thoughts?

            regards, tom lane

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20840.1537850987%40sss.pgh.pa.us