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

[Jose Fonseca]

On 24/03/17 14:22, Daniel Stone wrote:
> Hi Jose,
>
> On 24 March 2017 at 14:03, Jose Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com> wrote:
>> On 22/03/17 20:57, Dylan Baker wrote:
>>> Cross compiling for mingw is supported, and it provides a way to
>>> differentiate
>>> the build, host, and target machines [1], I've cross compiled for
>>> aarch64-linux-gnu, and it was trivial (I've been told autotools has a flag
>>> for
>>> this, but the meson approach is to write an ini file once, and use it
>>> again and
>>> again), and the first example of cross compiling is using mingw from linux
>>> [2].
>>>
>>>
>>> [1]https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/wiki/Reference-manual#build_machine-object
>>> [2]https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/wiki/Cross-compilation
>>
>>
>> Thanks for the info.
>>
>> It still scares me a bit that most Meson users are mostly Linux focused.
>
> That's not actually true ...
>
> A lot of the reason GStreamer went towards Meson is because it has
> native OS X (XCode project) and Windows (MinGW or Visual Studio
> project) support. Meson's own source tree goes out of its way to use
> spaces in directory and file names for its test suite, to make sure
> that that support never breaks. Every build of Meson is CI'd on
> AppVeyor as well as Travis for OS X. And of course, the GStreamer CI
> uses Meson for its non-Linux builds.
>
> It's true that a lot of the projects taking an interest of late have
> been Linux, yes. But if you're native to Windows / OS X, you just use
> VS/Xcode. There are (IMO) very few properly cross-platform projects
> who are 'Windows projects with a port' or 'mainly OS X but also runs
> on Linux', rather than cross-platform 'Linux projects'.

OK.

>> Another tool I heard good about but have not direct experience is
>> https://bazel.build .  Any thoughts about it?
>
> If you look at the FAQ, one of the first things you'll see is that
> they don't properly support Windows. It also requires Java to run,
> which I'd say would be a no-go if people are already complaining about
> the impossibility of installing several megabytes of Python stdlib.

I see.  Indeed.


Thanks.  From the label on the tin, it does sound like Meson ticks a lot 
of boxes then.


Like I said in another email, maybe mesademos is a good way to get our 
feet wet.

I can't guarantee I'll be able to dedicate much time, but at least get 
AppVeyor builds of it, since it has been a long objective of mine to get 
mesademos/piglit/etc builds on AppVeyor instead of a private Jenkins server.


Jose