Re: minimum Meson version

On Tue, 17 Jun 2025 at 22:19, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> Please do note that I was not suggesting removing support for it from minor
> versions and that the earliest we, IMO, would conceivably remove autoconf
> support would be PG 20.
>
> I'm sure there will be some folks desperate to run PG 20 on RHEL 8, ~3 years
> after main support ended, 2 years before end of maintenance support, but it
> won't be that many. And for those it still wouldn't be hard, they'd need to
> install some up2date dependencies, but that's the price for doing something
> that's a really really bad practice.

+many. I really don't understand why we go so far out of our way to
support compiling and running tests with a completely unmodified
ancient RHEL system.

I'm not saying we shouldn't support compiling Postgres on these
systems. But having Postgres compile with just the default system
packages seems an unreasonably high bar. People running ancient
systems like this should be comfortable enough with getting some more
recent build dependencies. Recent meson and ninja executables are just
a "pip install" away, even on RHEL8.