Re: [PATCH 1/6] meson: simplify and parameterize various standard function checks

From: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Date: Apr 23, 2025, 11:25 UTC
Message-ID: <aAjOIEs5Lwb9CvkU@pks.im>
In-Reply-To: <590d0daa-59ac-44f3-b277-e3e83ad1add5@gentoo.org>

On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 11:36:06AM -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On 4/22/25 3:31 AM, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 21, 2025 at 04:04:30PM -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote:
> >> On 4/21/25 1:51 PM, Eli Schwartz wrote:
> > I'd rather prefer to try and detect this generically instead of adding
> > more platform-specific configuration. It is way simpler to maintain, and
> > if we ever see that things don't work well on a specific platform we may
> > still reconsider at that point in time.
> 
> 
> Okay but, how do we generically detect that a platform triggers the
> Makefile advice "recommended if Git triggers O(n^2) behavior in your
> platform's qsort()"? I'm not sure how to write a compile-time check for
> this.
> 
> It's easy to write a compile-time check for whether a function exists,
> but it seems to have been an error that meson assumes some platforms
> will not provide the function, as that was never the intent of Git's
> support for internal qsort.

The question to me is whether this is still an issue that we need to care about nowadays. If we _know_ that it is still an issue that we need to address then I'm okay with adapting as required. But if we think that it's probably not an issue anymore then I'd rather wait and see whether anybody complains. Because if nobody does, then we can eventually just throw out this logic altogether.

I treat this as a bit of a canary. Git is quite old by now, so we need to question existing infrastructure every now and then so that we can in the best case throw out unneeded bits and pieces every once in a while as the surrounding ecosystem matures.

Patrick