Re: minimum Meson version

Hi,

On 2025-06-17 13:48:33 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> writes:
> > I see that Rocky Linux 8 ships with Meson 0.58.2 [0], so maybe that is a 
> > good target to aim for.  (I don't know if that carried over from RHEL 8 
> > or is their own doing.)  But there aren't any compelling features new in 
> > 0.58 (format strings seem nice but are pretty much cosmetic), so maybe 
> > setting the minimum to 0.57 is enough.
> 
> RHEL 8 does include meson 0.58.2.  However, it also ships ninja 1.8.2
> which is too old:
> 
> $ meson setup build
> ...
> Found ninja-1.8.2 at /usr/bin/ninja
> ninja: error: build.ninja:7378: multiple outputs aren't (yet?) supported by depslog; bring this up on the mailing
listif it affects you
 
> 
> WARNING: Could not create compilation database.

IIRC we discussed this before, in some other thread. We could make that work,
but at the time we didn't consider it worth working on.


> So in the Red Hat universe, the first release that has usable meson
> infrastructure for our purposes is RHEL 9, which has meson 0.63.3
> and ninja 1.10.2.  Not sure how that factors into this calculation.
> But unless we can back off our minimum ninja version, it's going
> to be a long time before we can abandon the makefiles.

From my POV, which I am sure is not uniformly shared, we don't need to support
new major PG versions on things like RHEL 8. After all full support for RHEL 8
has ended a year ago.

Greetings,

Andres Freund