RE: AIX support

Hi Peter,
Thanks for looking into this and providing your feedback.

> I took this idea of disabling static libraries in meson and made it a
> separate patch; see [0]. It looks like this patch is getting close to
> consensus, so we could commit it soon. Then you could rebase your patch
> over it, which would make it quite a bit simpler.

That’s a great idea and will definitely help simplify the overall changes.

Once that patch is committed, I’ll rebase my changes accordingly to align with the new approach.

> I think in general, the meson changes are ok. But I needed some
> changes, for example, your patch contains

Thanks for reviewing the changes.

> but the method .disabled() doesn't exist, it should be .found(). So I’m
> wondering how this patch was tested.

You’re correct — the method .disabled() doesn’t exist; it should be .found(). We initially tried to follow the same approach used for other dependencies (like docs, docs_pdf, gssapi), and didn’t encounter any errors during testing.

In Meson, the option() class implements disabled(), but the disabler() object does not. When we ran a sample test, we observed that Meson’s behaviour on AIX/Linux seems to ignore any unknown methods. As a result, the .disabled() conditional check was silently skipped, which explains why it didn’t fail during our tests.

> Another patch of interest to you could be [1], which moves the
> MAXIMUM_ALIGNOF computation into c.h. This should also simplify your
> patch. But that patch has not received any discussion so far.
This is a better approach. This would simplify the changes in both configure and meson.build.

> It's ok to split changes into multiple patches, and then recommend which parts you want
> reviewed first. But we need to see at least a rough outline of the
> complete plan before spending significant effort on reviewing the pieces.
Sure. We are working on the changes. I’ll submit the full patch accordingly.

Thanks again for your guidance and support!

Warm regards,

Sriram.