Re: PSA: Autoconf has risen from the dead

Hi,

On 2022-07-03 10:50:49 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > Hmm, I also don't know how annoying it's going to be to get the new
> > ninja/meson stuff working on macOS ... I really hope someone puts a
> > good set of directions on the wiki or in the documentation or
> > someplace.

Yea, I guess I should start a documentation section...

I've only used homebrew on mac, but with that it should be something along the
lines of

brew install meson
meson setup --buildtype debug -Dcassert=true build-directory
cd build-directory
ninja

of course if you want to build against some dependencies and / or run tap
tests, you need to do something similar to what you have to do for
configure. I.e.
- install perl modules [1]
- tell the build about location of homebrew [2]

> If you use MacPorts it's just "install those packages", and I imagine
> the same for Homebrew. I've not tried build-from-source on modern
> platforms.

I've done some semi automated testing (to be turned fully automatic) across
meson versions that didn't so far show any need for that. We do require a
certain minimum version of meson (indicated in the top-level meson.build,
raises an error if not met), which in turn requires a minimum version of ninja
(also errors).

The windows build with msbuild is slower on older versions of meson that are
unproblematic on other platforms. But given you're not going to install an
outdated meson from $package-manager there, I don't think it's worth worrying
about.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

[1] https://github.com/anarazel/postgres/blob/meson/.cirrus.yml#L638
[2] https://github.com/anarazel/postgres/blob/meson/.cirrus.yml#L742