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

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 24 March 2017 at 17:51, Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net> wrote:
> Dylan Baker <dylan at pnwbakers.com> writes:
>> I also think it's worth talking to Eric (who said he's porting X to meson),
>> Daniel Stone (who has patches to port weston to meson), and Peter Hutterer (who
>> has patches to port libinput to meson). If they're serious about seeing those
>> land meson is even more appealing, since it would be a single build system that
>> all of the *nix graphics stack would be moving towards, and would mean that we
>> wouldn't have an "Autotools for xorg", "meson for weston and libinput", "cmake for
>> piglit", and "<other build system> for mesa".
>
> My desire is to push enough of X.org to Meson that I can actually do CI
> of the X Server.  Right now CI is not really tractable on Travis because
> autogen.sh of all the dependencies takes too long.

... and I'm equally serious about Wayland/Weston. I find how slow it
is infuriating for personal development, but for CI, it means that
there's no point trying to test different build options, since the
overhead is so high. Meson would let us actually do that.

I understand there's a huge amount of acquired folk knowledge we're
throwing away with autotools, and in the ~13 years since I started
working on moving X.Org to autotools, I've evaluated and discarded
most of the others because I didn't think they were sufficiently
compelling to do so. In terms of its featureset,
accessibility/tractability to mere mortals, etc, Meson is the only one
I've found where the advantages of moving outweighed the
disadvantages.

I've been pretty buried in atomic work lately, but am going to send
out a revised patchset for Wayland & Weston after I've got the next
iteration out. Similarly I'd expect to see one or two releases
shipping with both build systems, whilst we work with downstreams to
beat any bugs out of the new system before cutting over.

Cheers,
Daniel