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

[Matt Turner]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 11:56 AM, Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 March 2017 at 18:06, Matt Turner <mattst88 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> (1) Non-recursive automake is necessary for parallel build performance
> Fully agree
>
>> (2) Non-recursive automake is intractably unmaintainable for
>> sufficiently large projects
> Not sure I agree here. Do the src/intel/Makefile* files, seem unmaintainable ?

Not by itself.

src/intel only accounts for 70 thousand lines of code. Mesa is 1.25 million.

>> (3) Mesa is a sufficiently large project
>>
> Again - fully agree.
>
>> Therefore using automake will be either bad for parallel build
>> performance, unmaintainable, or both.
>>
>> Meson aims to be a build system actually capable of replacing
>> autotools (IMO unlike cmake, scons, waf, et al.). It offers a much
>> cleaner domain specific language for writing the build rules, while
>> generating non-recursive ninja build files. It does not use libtool.
>> It supports Windows. It supports cross compilation.
>>
> Does it support, Darwin/MacOSX, Cygwin, any of the BSDs, Solaris (and
> alike) platforms,

Its website says "Linux, OSX, Windows, Gcc, Clang, Visual Studio and
others". I see Meson in FreeBSD's ports. It's written in python, so I
expect it will support any of the platforms we care about.

> How about Android - Android.mk or Blueprint.

We have gone over this.

> Does it have "dist", "check", "distcheck" or less commonly used

Our thinking is that by switching to a build system that doesn't
require large amounts of generated code (configure, Makefile.in, etc),
we will stop shipping the code generated by the build system in the
tarballs (which would just be created by git archive). None of that is
set in stone.

> "ctags" "cscope"  targets ?

I don't know.

>> And it has momentum: libepoxy already has a Meson build system. Others
>> in the X.Org community are experimenting with it for libinput, Wayland
>> and Weston, and the xserver.
>>
>> All of that makes Meson very compelling.
> That's the thing - I'm never said that it's _not_ a very compelling project.
> I'm saying that it's not there yet - mostly due to the list above.

Perfect. Since no one claimed it's "there yet" there is nothing to
disagree about.