A PostgreSQL release tarball contains a number of prebuilt files, in
particular files produced by bison, flex, perl, and well as html and
man documentation. We have done this consistent with established
practice at the time to not require these tools for building from a
tarball. Some of these tools were hard to get, or get the right
version of, from time to time, and shipping the prebuilt output was a
convenience to users.
Now this has at least two problems:
One, we have to make the build system(s) work in two modes: Building
from a git checkout and building from a tarball. This is pretty
complicated, but it works so far for autoconf/make. It does not
currently work for meson; you can currently only build with meson from
a git checkout. Making meson builds work from a tarball seems very
difficult or impossible. One particular problem is that since meson
requires a separate build directory, we cannot make the build update
files like gram.h in the source tree. So if you were to build from a
tarball and update gram.y, you will have a gram.h in the source tree
and one in the build tree, but the way things work is that the
compiler will always use the one in the source tree. So you cannot,
for example, make any gram.y changes when building from a tarball.
This seems impossible to fix in a non-horrible way.
Second, there is increased interest nowadays in precisely tracking the
origin of software. We can reasonably track contributions into the
git tree, and users can reasonably track the path from a tarball to
packages and downloads and installs. But what happens between the git
tree and the tarball is obscure and in some cases non-reproducible.
The solution for both of these issues is to get rid of the step that
adds prebuilt files to the tarball. The tarball now only contains
what is in the git tree (*). Getting the additional build
dependencies is no longer a problem nowadays, and the complications to
keep these dual build modes working are significant. And of course we
want to get the meson build system working universally.
This commit removes the make distprep target altogether. The make
dist target continues to do its job, it just doesn't call distprep
anymore.
(*) - The tarball also contains the INSTALL file that is built at make
dist time, but not by distprep. This is unchanged for now.
The make maintainer-clean target, whose job it is to remove the
prebuilt files in addition to what make distclean does, is now just an
alias to make distprep. (In practice, it is probably obsolete given
that git clean is available.)
The following programs are now hard build requirements in configure
(they were already required by meson.build):
- bison
- flex
- perl
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>
Reviewed-by: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/e07408d9-e5f2-d9fd-5672-f53354e9305e@eisentraut.org
make maintainer-check was obscure and rarely called in practice, and
many breakages were missed. Fold everything that make maintainer-check
used to do into the normal build. Specifically:
- Call duplicate_oids when genbki.pl is called.
- Check for tabs in SGML files when the documentation is built.
- Run msgfmt with the -c option during the regular build. Add an
additional configure check to see whether we are using the GNU
version. (make maintainer-check probably used to fail with non-GNU
msgfmt.)
Keep maintainer-check as around as phony target for the time being in
case anyone is calling it. But it won't do anything anymore.
This can do various source code checks that are not appropriate for
either the build or the regression tests. Currently: duplicate_oids,
SGML syntax and tabs check, NLS syntax check.
Documentation files in HTML and man formats are now prepared for
distribution using the distprep make target, like everything else. They
are placed in doc/src/sgml/html and manX and installed from there by
make install, if present. The business with the tarballs in the tarball
is gone.
This patch adds declaration so that they end up in section 3, and adds
them to the Makefiles to install them.
Also, some synopses needed reflowing so that they look nice in 80-column
terminals.
another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).
This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.
rather than making index.html a symlink to the autogenerated name.
Fixes fatal problems with tar programs that don't handle symlinks
very well (MacOS X).
(The names user.html, admin.html, etc. are still available as make
targets, but they aren't packaged anymore.)
Use the manifest file that the stylesheets generate as the file list
for packaging. Put graphics in the right place while building, not
while packaging, so you can actually look at them after building.
system. Some systems did not understand the 'l' section, and in general
it wasn't entirely appropriate.
On SCO OpenServer, the man pages won't be installed at all until someone
figures out their man system.
Make version.sgml the central place for updating version numbers in the
documentation. Document titles now contain the version number of the
release they belong to.
filelist.sgml is the central (and only) place to declare system entities
(i.e., sgml files). No longer a need to declare them in each document
header.
There is no longer any need to maintain duplicate chapter lists in
postgres.sgml and user/admin/etc.sgml, everything is build from the same
sources. Some parameter entities allow for different text to be included
when the integrated or a single doc set is generated, which eliminates the
problems that had caused this to fail in the past.
Peter Eisentraut
Peter Eisentraut
Magnus Hagander
Alvaro Herrera
PostgreSQL Daemon
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Thomas G. Lockhart