> I think you've chosen the worst-common-denominator > solution. There is nothing to like about an explicit list of > installed files.
This is a difficult and very opinionated question. Personally, I like to use CMake's glob_recurse + configure_depends even for C/C++ source files in my small personal projects for simplicity, so I completely understand and somewhat agree with your point. In practice however, both Meson[1] and CMake[2], the two most popular build systems, actively discourage any type of globbing/automatic file discovery magic, and they have good reasons for doing so. The main problem with it, which was also why Andreas Freund suggested doing this in the headerscheck thread is that this breaks dependency resolution: if a new header file appears, that won't result in a build script change, which means that the build system won't pick it up. It won't get installed, it won't get verified by headerscheck, etc. This means that it can: * lead to CI failures/misses * lead to developers missing build errors locally, wasting CI time * break git bisect The workaround for it (e.g. cmake's configure_depends) is to instead of running the glob expression / git ls-files / etc during configure time, run it for every build invocation. That's fine on fast NVMEs, terrible on spinning disks / slow fs with large projects like postgres. > that we will sometimes forget to add some new header to the list. > We won't notice such omissions until some end user complains, > maybe years later. This already happens, I just submitted a patch for a fix like this yesterday, which I noticed while working on this [3]. We only use glob/add_subdir for some directories, not all of them. The current behavior is inconsistent, and because of that, it is easier to miss. I think having a clear rule, and following it everywhere would improve things. > At least for me, > git ls-files 'src/include/*.h' > seems to produce a pretty usable list of server headers. I was thinking about adding a configure-time step that verifies the files: during configuration, it checks if we missed any headers (e.g. they are not in the list files), and reports an error. Still keeping the explicit requirement, but adding a guardrail - also, CI would fail quickly if something is missed. For now I left it out to: a. keep the first patch simpler b. keep things consistent, because while this is true for src/include, it's not true for the other directories, we do not install all header files from those (e.g. src/interfaces/libpq). If I wanted to add automatic checks there, I would have to also add exclude lists. [1]: https://mesonbuild.com/FAQ.html#why-cant-i-specify-target-files-with-a-wildcard [2]: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/command/file.html#filesystem [3]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAN4CZFP6NOjv__4Mx%2BiQD8StdpbHvzDAatEQn2n15UKJ%3DMySSQ%40mail.gmail.com
