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.
