Re: Is a modern build system acceptable for older platforms

On 2018-05-01 12:19:28 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 5:46 AM, Hartmut Holzgraefe
> <hartmut(dot)holzgraefe(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > I could probably continue with this brain dump forever, ...
>
> I found your brain dump an interesting read, and I have to say that it
> leaves me rather uninspired about making a change. It sounds to me
> like if we change, some things will be better and others will not be
> as good. The good news is that if we decide to change, it sounds like
> we won't be a lot worse off than we are today. The bad news is that
> it doesn't sound like we'll be a lot better off, either.

How is being able to build extensions on windows reasonably not an
improvement? It's really hard to build pgxs like stuff on windows right
now. Also not having to maintain a fair amount of visual studio project
generation code? And getting faster builds that don't suffer from weird
parallelism issues because dependencies can't be expressed properly in
parallel make? ...

It seems fair to argue that it's not worth the pain to get there, but
how it'd not be an improvement to be there I really don't get.

Greetings,

Andres Freund