mesonbuild
Allow overriding programs from the command line
People coming from autotools are used to having easy access for overriding programs. This should ease that transition.
cc @anarazel. This could help us to remove the options in the Postgres build.
I plan on adding a test in the future if people seem to think that this is a good approach. @jpakkane had previously said he was open to such a feature, but people have different opinions as time change.
Hmm not sure how to fix the CI at the moment. I must be missing something with Coredata. Any help is appreciated!
@tristan957 what about instead writing a web page in the site which do a comparison of usages between meson and autotools ? I don't think it's a good idea to add several ways to do the same things
I've been using the autotools during more than 10 years. When I've heard about meson, i've used it quite easily. There are examples, community is responsive. It should be sufficient
I don't think it's a good idea to add several ways to do the same things
But we already have several ways to do everything else. Every command-line -D option to meson can be specified in a machine file, for example. I don't really have a problem adding "several" ways to do the opposite by taking a machine file setting and allowing it to be specified on the command line.
Furthermore, it's a frequent pain point of users, to have to create a whole new file just to pass one tiny little tweak to meson.
@tristan957 what about instead writing a web page in the site which do a comparison of usages between meson and autotools ? I don't think it's a good idea to add several ways to do the same things
I've been using the autotools during more than 10 years. When I've heard about meson, i've used it quite easily. There are examples, community is responsive. It should be sufficient
I've tried advocating for machine files in Postgres for this purpose, but it was said it was a worse solution than this, so here we are, me proposing a solution which makes the transition from autotools to meson a little bit easier.
I have conflicting feelings about this MR, since we already have machine files for exactly this use case. On one hand I can see how it might be nice under some circumtances but OTOH having more than one way of doing something has a tendency to come back and bite you in the ass.
Well that is unfortunate since you initially expressed interest in it. All I can tell you is that machine files are not satisfactory for the powers that be in Postgres.