Re: automatically generating node support functions

Hi,

On 2022-07-11 15:54:22 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > On Mon, Jul 11, 2022 at 1:57 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> >> More generally, I'm having second thoughts about the wisdom of
> >> auto-generating the NodeTag enum at all. With the current setup,
> >> I am absolutely petrified about the risk of silent ABI breakage
> >> thanks to the enum order changing.
>
> > I think this is a valid concern, but having it be automatically
> > generated is awfully handy, so I think it would be nice to find some
> > way of preserving that.
>
> Agreed. The fundamental problem seems to be that each build toolchain
> has its own source of truth about the file processing order, but we now
> see that there had better be only one. We could make the sole source
> of truth about that be gen_node_support.pl itself, I think.
>
> We can't simply move the file list into gen_node_support.pl, because

> (a) the build system has to know about the dependencies involved

Meson has builtin support for tools like gen_node_support.pl reporting which
files they've read and then to use those as dependencies. It'd not be a lot of
effort to open-code that with make either.

Doesn't look like we have dependency handling in Solution.pm?

> (b) gen_node_support.pl wouldn't know what to do in VPATH situations.

We could easily add a --include-path argument or such. That'd be trivial to
set for all of the build solutions.

FWIW, for meson I already needed to add an option to specify the location of
output files (since scripts are called from the root of the build directory).

Greetings,

Andres Freund