On Fri, Jun 21, 2024 at 7:21 AM Dave Page <dp...@pgadmin.org> wrote: > My assumption all along was that Meson would replace autoconf etc. before > anything happened with MSVC, precisely because that's the type of environment > all the Postgres devs work in primarily. Instead we seem to have taken what I > think is a flawed approach of entirely replacing the build system on the > platform none of the devs use, whilst leaving the new system as an > experimental option on the platforms it will have had orders of magnitude > more testing. > > What makes it worse, is that I don't believe anyone was warned about such a > drastic change. Packagers were told about the git archive changes to the > tarball generation, but that's it (and we've said before, we can't expect > packagers to follow all the activity on -hackers).
I agree that we should have given a heads up to pgsql-packagers. The fact that that wasn't done is a mistake, and inconsiderate. At the same time, I don't quite know who should have done that exactly when. Note that, while I believe Andres is on pgsql-packagers, many committers are not, and we have no written guidelines anywhere for what kinds of changes require notifying pgsql-packagers. Previous threads on this issue: https://postgr.es/m/zqzp_vmjcerm1...@paquier.xyz http://postgr.es/m/20230408191007.7lysd42euafwl...@awork3.anarazel.de Note that in the second of these threads, which contemplated removing MSVC for v16, I actually pointed out that if we went that way, we needed to notify pgsql-packagers ASAP. But, since we didn't do that, no email was ever sent to pgsql-packagers about this, or at least not that I can find. Still, MSVC support was removed more than six months ago, so even if somebody didn't see any of the pgsql-hackers discussion about this, there's been a fair amount of time (and a beta) for someone to notice that their build process isn't working any more. It seems a bit weird to me to start complaining about this now. As a practical matter, I don't think MSVC is coming back. The buildfarm was already changed over to use meson, and it would be pretty disruptive to try to re-add buildfarm coverage for a resurrected MSVC on the eve of beta2. I think we should focus on improving whatever isn't quite right in meson -- plenty of other people have also complained about various things there, me included -- rather than trying to undo over a year's worth of work by lots of people to get things on Windows switched over to MSVC. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
