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Re: meson: Add _static and _shared suffixes to the library names

From:	Nazir Bilal Yavuz <byavuz81(at)gmail(dot)com>
To:	Peter Eisentraut <peter(at)eisentraut(dot)org>
Cc:	Jacob Champion <jacob(dot)champion(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org>, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de>
Subject:	Re: meson: Add _static and _shared suffixes to the library names
Date:	2025-08-13 06:36:23
Message-ID:	CAN55FZ2_oyp0+dKCjBkZA1sFjM23gF-5TSh7t=isNCLov9JZGA@mail.gmail.com
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Hi,

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and I am sorry for the first
proposal. It is a mistake on my part, I should have thought more.

On Tue, 12 Aug 2025 at 21:47, Peter Eisentraut <peter(at)eisentraut(dot)org> wrote:
>
> On 12.08.25 18:37, Jacob Champion wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 12, 2025 at 9:27 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> >>> Is there a way to work around this problem in a way that affects Windows only?
> >>
> >> Even on Windows, the proposal is unacceptable.
> >
> > Sure, but I'm hoping that there's some Windows-specific Meson
> > twiddling that can be done to disambiguate the debug files on disk.
>
> Here is an older discussion that also involved having concurrent
> shared_library() and static_library() on Windows, and the general
> sentiment there appeared to be that this should (be made to) work:
> https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/459

I think the problem in the link you shared is different, we have
problems with Windows debug files (*.pdb files) but they have problems
with the library files themselves. Our problem is that the latest
built library tries to overwrite the early built library's .pdb file
and the build fails. So, my guess is that the libraries are in
different paths but their .pdb files are still in the same path. I did
a quick check and found that we have only one .pdb file after the
build, which I think confirms my guess. After the #1 fix applied, we
have two .pdb files; one .pdb file for each library type.

> So I don't know what changed now, but I think we should think about in
> terms of what changed rather than fixing our code.

I think we had this problem for a long time but the new ninja version
showed that problem.

I found two ways to fix that problem, both approaches fix the problem
by themselves:

1- Setting different names for .pdb files for shared libraries only on
the Windows OS. I think that is the correct fix, it just adds _shared
suffix to .pdb files of shared libraries on the Windows OS.

2- Using '/DEBUG:FULL' instead of '/DEBUG:FASTLINK' in the Windows CI
task but this causes more memory to be used. It seems that the error
appears only when the '/DEBUG:FASTLINK' is set. '/DEBUG:FULL' is a
default option, so we may decide to not add it at all. I explicitly
added it as I found this easier to understand. This approach fixes the
build but I think it is not the correct fix, we will have one .pdb
file after this fix; not one for each library type.

Here is how the directories look like after the fixes are applied:

$ dir C:\cirrus\build\src\interfaces\libpq ->

master with old ninja (master with new ninja fails):