Develop PostgREST on (Intel) macOS

[jenstroeger]

Hello,

I followed the Nix development and build environment to set up nix on my local machine — an Intel Mac running macOS 13.7 (Ventura). The nix setup itself went fine without problems but when I tried running PostgREST tests I get the following:

[nix-shell:~/opt/dev/postgrest]$ postgrest-test-io 
Configuration is affected by the following files:
- cabal.project
- cabal.project.freeze
Build profile: -w ghc-9.4.8 -O1
In order, the following will be built (use -v for more details):
 - postgrest-13.1 (lib) (first run)
 - postgrest-13.1 (exe:postgrest) (first run)
Preprocessing library for postgrest-13.1...
Building library for postgrest-13.1...

on the commandline: error: [-Werror]
    -split-sections is not useful on this platform since it always uses subsections via symbols. Ignoring.
Error: [Cabal-7125]
Failed to build postgrest-13.1 (which is required by exe:postgrest from postgrest-13.1).

@taimoorzaeem suggested here to tweak Cabal settings, but I also wanted to ask the community if anybody here develops on a Mac and perhaps has a few tops?

Much thanks!
Jens

[jenstroeger]

@taimoorzaeem Not sure, maybe try removing -split-sections flag from cabal.project file.

That seems to have worked to unblock the tests for now.

[steve-chavez]

Looked at removing split-sections, but it's for reducing the binary size, so not a good idea.

-split-sections is not useful on this platform since it always uses subsections via symbols. Ignoring.

The error is pretty clear. I think we should include the flag conditionally only for supported platforms, looks like conditionals can be used in postgrest.cabal but not in cabal.project:

Warning: /home/stevechavez/Projects/postgrest/cabal.project: Unrecognized
section 'if' on line 4

[steve-chavez]

I tried to add it like this:

  if !(os(darwin) && arch(x86_64))
    ghc-options: -split-sections

But I get:

Warning: [option-split-section] 'ghc-options: -split-sections' is not needed.
Use the --enable-split-sections configure flag.

Looks like we have to add it on cabal v2-build --enable-split-sections instead, but then we lose the conditional. Very confusing interface.

Edit: sharing in case it helps main...steve-chavez:postgrest:split-sections

[wolfgangwalther]

There's a difference between putting it in cabal.project with package * and putting it in postgresql.cabal: IIUC, the former will do it for dependencies as well, not only for the postgrest package itself. So that move wouldn't work.

This was added in 0eca295. It was moved to the main cabal.project file in 7319912. That latter commit indicates that this is only used for cabal builds, but not stack.

For a while, we have only been using stack and nix to build these executables - and not cabal directly anymore. I think we can just remove the -split-sections stuff here.

[steve-chavez]

I think we can just remove the -split-sections stuff here.

Cool. Opened #4388