Re: Remove distprep

Hi,

On 2023-06-09 11:10:14 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Per discussion at the unconference[0], I started to write a patch that
> removes the make distprep target. A more detailed explanation of the
> rationale is also in the patch.

Thanks for tackling this!

> It needs some polishing around the edges, but I wanted to put it out here to
> get things moving and avoid duplicate work.

It'd be nice if we could get this in soon, so we could move ahead with the
src/tools/msvc removal.

> One thing in particular that isn't clear right now is how "make world"
> should behave if the documentation tools are not found. Maybe we should
> make a build option, like "--with-docs", to mirror the meson behavior.

Isn't that somewhat unrelated to distprep? I see that you removed missing,
but I don't really understand why as part of this commit?

> -# If there are any files in the source directory that we also generate in the
> -# build directory, they might get preferred over the newly generated files,
> -# e.g. because of a #include "file", which always will search in the current
> -# directory first.
> -message('checking for file conflicts between source and build directory')

You're thinking this can be removed because distclean is now reliable? There
were some pretty annoying to debug issues early on, where people switched from
an in-tree autoconf build to meson, with some files left over from the source
build, causing problems at a *later* time (when the files should have changed,
but the wrong ones were picked up). That's not really related distprep etc,
so I'd change this separately, if we want to change it.

> diff --git a/src/tools/pginclude/cpluspluscheck b/src/tools/pginclude/cpluspluscheck
> index 4e09c4686b..287395887c 100755
> --- a/src/tools/pginclude/cpluspluscheck
> +++ b/src/tools/pginclude/cpluspluscheck
> @@ -134,6 +134,9 @@ do
> test "$f" = src/interfaces/ecpg/preproc/preproc.h && continue
> test "$f" = src/test/isolation/specparse.h && continue
>
> + # FIXME
> + test "$f" = src/backend/utils/adt/jsonpath_internal.h && continue
> +
> # ppport.h is not under our control, so we can't make it standalone.
> test "$f" = src/pl/plperl/ppport.h && continue

Hm, what's that about?

We really ought to replace these scripts with something better, which
understands concurrency...

Greetings,

Andres Freund