Re: meson: Allow disabling static libraries - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Andres Freund
Subject Re: meson: Allow disabling static libraries
Date
Msg-id hbncx2rakvfhnionll4g4y6lxhx23wpr7g4vcncdyocfvlwdbh@e4q7u4pjbuhw
Whole thread Raw
In response to meson: Allow disabling static libraries  (Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>)
Responses Re: meson: Allow disabling static libraries
List pgsql-hackers
Hi,

On 2026-01-20 08:03:58 +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> This patch allows disabling the build of static libraries using the standard
> meson option -Ddefault_library=shared (defaults to "both"). This option
> would work out of the box if you use the library() function to build
> libraries, but we use shared_library() and static_library() separately, for
> reasons that are explained in src/interfaces/libpq/meson.build.  So now with
> this, the option works again as expected from the end user's perspective.
> 
> This approach was suggested by Tristan Partin over in the AIX thread[0], but
> I figured this could be a generally usable feature, as some distributions
> don't want to build static libraries.

Makes sense to me.


> For illustration and continuous testing, I disabled static libraries in the
> CI SanityCheck task.

Hm. I guess that makes sense.


> The opposite case of disabling shared libraries doesn't work at the moment.
> I think that is much less useful, but if someone wanted to, they could
> implement it in this same framework.

I suspect there are some folks interested in that, although I don't find that
a particularly interesting thing to do personally.  It'd certainly a bit weird
to document, since it fundamentally won't work for the server...


>  ###############################################################
> @@ -3499,18 +3513,20 @@ endif
>  installed_targets = [
>    backend_targets,
>    bin_targets,
> -  libpq_st,
>    pl_targets,
>    contrib_targets,
>    nls_mo_targets,
>    ecpg_targets,
>  ]
> +if dep_static_lib.found()
> +  installed_targets += [libpq_st]
> +endif

Wonder if we ought to define installed_targets = [] earlier and allow
different meson.build files to add themselves, instead of putting knowledge
like this into a central spot.

Separately, perhaps it'd be mildly nicer to have a boolean for static libs
instead of using .found() everywhere.


Greetings,

Andres Freund



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