Tasks for meson use in postgres:

• Missing Features
  • libedit support #38 libedit support (easy-medium)
  • generate pkg-config files (easy-medium)
  • fully implement "native language support" (see https://postgr.es/m/bfcd5353-0fb3-a05c-6f62-164d98c5689d%40enterprisedb.com )
  • check vs installcheck (maybe via different test setups?)
  • meson: postgres flex wrapper #50
• Not yet built in meson:
  • check for other bits and pieces
  • ECPG, except for windows
  • pl/tcl (medium) #22
• Not tested yet with meson:
  • ECPG (medium)
  • search for other "manually invoked" tests (easy)
• OS dependent issues
  • building against system ldap fails on macos #9 (unknown difficulty)
  • rpath on netbsd broken for at least perl, there's also a possibly related issue on suse
  • AIX symbol generation needs to be fixed
  • windows icon generation (PGAPPICON and PGFILEDESC in makefiles) is implemented only for one or two tools, needs to be generalized
  • simplify exports.txt handling, use it in all the required places (e.g. ecpg)
• Installation
  • "pkglibdir" logic from src/Makefile.global.in needs to be mirrored to some degree (medium)
  • meson: install headers to the same location as autoconf build does #30 (partially done)
  • Header install with install_subdir() is error prone (think tempfiles)
• Cleanups:
  • Centralize operating-system specific logic. There's too many places querying host_machine.system() right now
  • Merge gendef.pl and gendef2.pl back together (medium)
  • src/tools/testwrap should be cleaned up made unnecessary (path unclear as of yet)
  • src/tools/irlink shouldn't be bash, but python #36 (medium)
  • merge top-level of tap and regress test specifications, shouldn't be two separate arrays with the same information at the top #31 (easy-medium, fairly verbose changes)
• Open questions:
  • figure out how to deal with PGXS / building out-of-tree extension
  • LLVM bitcode generation implementation isn't even close to generalized enough (hard)
• Other Todos:
  • meson: write test for pkg-config based extension builds #58 (easy - medium)
  • installation.sgml etc need a lot of adjustment
  • Write README.md introducing how to build with meson on a number of operating systems #33 (easy)
  • sync up configure tests / meson implementation, add missing ones
• Bugs:
  • Currently all PG_TEST_EXTRA tests are run unconditionally #28
  • test for availability of IPC::Run at configure time, instead of failing tests due to missing it #32 (easy)
• Implement missing options:
  • Synchronize option descriptions from configure.ac to meson_options.txt (easy)
  • Check which other options we want to have that configure has but meson_options doesn't
  • --with-wal-blocksize / XLOG_BLCKSZ (easy) #15
  • --with-segsize / RELSEG_SIZE (easy) #16
  • --with-pgport (easy) #17
  • --enable-tap-tests, currently unconditional, without even checking for it (easy) #18
  • meson: Implement missing directory options #61

Testing Tasks

• automated testing of various linux distributions, via docker containers, at least (should be optional cirrus tasks):
  • RHEL 7 (easy-medium) #19
  • RHEL 8 (easy-medium) #20
  • Fedora Rawhide (easy-medium) #21
  • Suse (See Adding openSUSE Tumbleweed to meson build #7 )
  • Debian on linux arm (supported by cirrus), image exists already (easy)
• automated testing via VMs
  • OpenBSD ( openbsd: Build Image pg-vm-images#6 )
  • NetBSD ( netbsd: Build Image pg-vm-images#7 )
• automated test against all supported meson versions (easy-medium)
• Add test of meson upstream versions #81 (easy-medium)
• Test a few extensions built via PGXS in CI (easy)
• Automate building a lot of extensions via script (medium)

Improvements to the meson integration that likely aren't critical:

• build dependency files for xsltproc et al for more accurate incremental builds (medium-hard)

Questions:

• Do we need to implement "sqlmansectnum" logic for docs?
• Partial installation support needed? Right now everything will be installed. Likely a problem for things like src/test/modules/dummy_index_am - but those currently need to be installed for tests.

Relevant meson improvements / issues:

• caching for library searches - biggest contributor to configure time now
• Framework dependency extracts -I in addition to framework, leading to endless include recursion mesonbuild/meson#10002 - worked around, but still a trap
• Expose Environment::get_build_command() to meson.build mesonbuild/meson#8511 - not critical, but helpful
• arm macos libraries rejected due to expecting aarch64, but seeing aarch64e mesonbuild/meson#9493 - worked around, but still a trap
• vs_module_defs should be allowed for executable(). mesonbuild/meson#9254 - would simplify code
• Invalid XML generated in testlog.junit.xml with \x07 in test output mesonbuild/meson#9894 - not critical, but would allow easier to analyze test results
• mtest TAP parser parses fails on Test::More and node-tap subtests mesonbuild/meson#10032 - should fix so that we eventually can rely on tap subtests (once minimum meson version is high enough)