Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson

Hi,

On 2021-10-15 11:23:00 +1300, Thomas Munro wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 11:00 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > Peter E. did some hacking towards another solution awhile ago,
> > but IIRC it involved changing the built binaries, and I think
> > we concluded that the benefits didn't justify that.
>
> Yeah, by now there are lots of useful blogs from various projects
> figuring out that you can use the install_name_tool to adjust the
> paths it uses to be absolute or relative to certain magic words, like
> @executable_path/../lib/blah.dylib, which is tempting, but...
> realistically, for serious hacking on a Mac, SIP is so annoying that
> it isn't the only reason you'll want to turn it off: it stops
> dtrace/dtruss/... from working, and somehow prevents debuggers from
> working when you've ssh'd in from a remote machine with a proper
> keyboard, and probably more things that I'm forgetting.

Meson has support for using install_name_tool to remove "build time" rpaths
and set "install time" rpaths during the installation process - which uses
install_name_tool on mac.

If, and perhaps that's too big an if, relative rpaths actually work despite
SIP, it might be worth setting a relative install_rpath, because afaict that
should then work both for a "real" installation and our temporary test one.

If absolute rpaths are required, it'd make the process a bit more expensive,
because we'd probably need to change a configure time option during the temporary
install. No actual rebuilds would be required, but still.

Greetings,

Andres Freund