Re: meson: Optionally disable installation of test modules

Hi,

On 2023-01-30 08:37:42 +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> One open issue (IMO) with the meson build system is that it installs the
> test modules under src/test/modules/ as part of a normal installation. This
> is because there is no way to set up up the build system to install extra
> things only when told. I think we still need a way to disable this somehow,
> so that building a production installation doesn't end up with a bunch of
> extra files.
>
> The attached simple patch is a starting point for discussion. It just
> disables the subdirectory src/test/modules/ based on some Boolean setting.
> This could be some new top-level option, or maybe part of PG_TEST_EXTRA, or
> something else? With this, I get an identical set of installed files from
> meson. I imagine this option would be false by default and developers would
> enable it.

Bilal, with a bit of help by me, worked on an alternative approach to
this. It's a lot more verbose in the initial change, but wouldn't increase the
amount of work/lines for new test modules. The main advantage is that we
wouldn't have disable the modules by default, which I think would be quite
likely to result in plenty people not running the tests.

Sending a link instead of attaching, in case you already registered a cfbot entry:
https://github.com/anarazel/postgres/commit/d1d192a860da39af9aa63d7edf643eed0eeee7c4

Probably worth adding an install-test-modules target for manual use.

Greetings,

Andres Freund