Re: Is a modern build system acceptable for older platforms

On 2018-05-02 23:43:50 +0200, Hartmut Holzgraefe wrote:
> On 02.05.2018 17:44, Robert Haas wrote:
> > But having parallel make work better and more efficiently
> > and with fewer hard-to-diagnose failure modes would definitely be
> > nice.
> 
> that's especially a thing I haven't seen in "our" environment,
> this was an area where autotools and cmake didn't really differ,
> at least not for the Unix/Makefile side of things.

Recursive make like ours can't do full parallelism because dependencies
can't be fully expressed. With cmake that's not an issue. And its ninja
generator ends up being considerably faster than makefiles.

Now you could argue that we could just rewrite to non-recursive
make. But that'd be nearly as much work as migrating to another
buildsystem.

Greetings,

Andres Freund