Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson - v11 - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From samay sharma
Subject Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson - v11
Date
Msg-id CAJxrbywu6HazUtPm-mJPvbx8Af63ZoZYVNGKna5W2VPq=pBWfA@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson - v11  (Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>)
List pgsql-hackers
Hi,

On Wed, Aug 24, 2022 at 8:30 AM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
Hi,

On 2022-08-24 11:39:06 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> I have looked at your branch at 0545eec895:
>
> 258f6dc0a7 Don't hardcode tmp_check/ as test directory for tap tests
> 8ecc33cf04 Split TESTDIR into TESTLOGDIR and TESTDATADIR
>
> I think these patches are split up a bit incorrectly.  If you apply
> the first patch by itself, then the output appears in tab_comp_dir/
> directly under the source directory.  And then the second patch moves
> it to tmp_check/tap_comp_dir/.  If there is an intent to apply these
> patches separately somehow, this should be cleaned up.

How is that happening with that version of the patch? The test puts
tap_comp_dir under TESTDIR, and TESTDIR is $(CURDIR)/tmp_check. There was an
earlier version of the patch that was split one more time that did have that
problem, but I don't quite see how that version has it?


> I haven't checked the second patch in detail yet, but it looks like
> the thought was that the first patch is about ready to go.
>
> 834a40e609 meson: prereq: Extend gendef.pl in preparation for meson
>
> I'm not qualified to check that in detail, but it looks reasonable
> enough to me.
>
> See attached patch (0001) for a perlcritic fix.

Thanks.


> 97a0b096e8 meson: prereq: Add src/tools/gen_export.pl
>
> This produces leading whitespace in the output files that at least on
> darwin wasn't there before.  See attached patch (0002).  This should
> be checked again on other platforms as well.

Hm, to me the indentation as is makes more sense, but ...

> Other than that this looks good.  Attached is a small cosmetic patch (0003).

I wonder if we should rewrite this in python - I chose perl because I thought
we could share it, but as you pointed out, that's not possible, because we
don't want to depend on perl during the autoconf build from a tarball.


> e0a8387660 solaris: Use versioning scripts instead of -Bsymbolic
>
> This looks like a good idea.  The documentation clearly states that
> -Bsymbolic shouldn't be used, at least not in the way we have been
> doing.  Might as well go ahead with this and give it a whirl on the
> build farm.

Cool. I looked at this because I was confused about getting warnings with
autoconf that I wasn't getting with meson.


> 0545eec895 meson: Add docs
>
> We should think more about how to arrange the documentation.  We
> probably don't want to copy-and-paste all the introductory and
> requirements information.  I think we can make this initially much
> briefer, like the Windows installation chapter.  For example, instead
> of documenting each setup option again, just mention which ones exist
> and then point (link) to the configure chapter for details.

The current docs, including the windows ones, are already hard to follow. I
think we should take some care to not make the meson bits even more
confusing. Cross referencing left and right seems problematic from that angle.

On Configure options:

To add to the above, very few sections are an exact copy paste. The arguments and default behaviors of quite a few configure options are different. The change in default behavior and arguments is primarily due to "auto" features which get enabled if the dependencies are found. Whereas with make, we have explicit --enable or --disable options which don't take any arguments.

Also, a few instructions / commands which worked with make will need to be done a bit differently due to environment variables etc. which also had to be communicated.

Communicating these differences and nuances with cross referencing would make it confusing as most of this information is in the explanation paragraph.

On requirements:

They are also a bit different eg. readline is not a "required" thing anymore, perl, flex, bison are required etc. Also, these are bullet points with information inlined and not separate sections, so cross-referencing here also would be hard.

Regards,
Samay


> I spent a bit of time with the test suites.  I think there is a
> problem in that selecting a test suite directly, like
>
>     meson test -C _build --suite recovery
>
> doesn't update the tmp_install.  So if this is the first thing you run
> after a build, everything will fail.  Also, if you run this later, the
> tmp_install doesn't get updated, so you're not testing up-to-date
> code.

At the moment creation of the tmp_install is its own test suite. I don't know
if that's the best way, or what the best way is, but that explains that
fact. You can do the above without the issue by specifying
--suite setup --suite recovery.


Greetings,

Andres Freund

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