[RFC libdrm 0/2] Replace the build system with meson

[Dylan Baker]

Hi Emil,

Quoting Emil Velikov (2017-03-16 16:35:33)
> While I can see you're impressed by Meson, I would kindly urge you to
> not use it here. As you look closely you can see that one could
> trivially improve the times, yet the biggest thing is that most of the
> code in libdrm must go ;-)

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, I don't really expect this to land ever. I sent
it out more because I'd written it and it works and is a useful demonstration of
meson+ninja performance. Obviously 20 seconds -> 5 seconds isn't a huge deal :);
but in a larger project, consider that a 4x speedup would be 4 minutes to 1
minute, and that is a huge difference in time.

> 
> As the port is not 1:1 wrt the autoconf one, the performance numbers
> above are comparing apples to oranges.

I fail to see what I'm missing from meson that would have an effect on the
times I reported. There are some files that are installed by autoconf that I
didn't bother to install with meson (because I don't expect this to land). Since
I didn't time installs, I don't see how it isn't an apples to apples comparison.

I understand that libdrm is a pessimal case for recursive-make since most
sub folders contain < 5 C files, However, even if you were to flatten the make
files meson+ninja would still be faster when you consider that meson
configures and builds faster than autotools configures.

> If you/others are unhappy with the build times of libdrm - poke me on
> IRC. I will give you some easy tips on how to improve those.
> 
> You have some good python knowledge - I would kindly urge you to
> improve/rewrite the slow and/or hacky python scripts we have in mesa.
> This is a topic that was mentioned multiple times, and a part where
> everyone will be glad to see some progress.
> 
> Thanks
> Emil

The real goal here is to do mesa (in case I didn't make that clear either), and
the advantage for mesa is not just performance, it's that meson supports visual
studio on windows; which means that we could hopefully not just get faster
builds, but also replace both autotools and scons with a single build system.

Dylan
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