ESC meeting minutes: 2020-02-13

[Luboš Luňák]

On Thursday 13 of February 2020, Miklos Vajna wrote:
> * Meson build system experiments by Jussi Pakkanen (Ilmari)
>     + Ilmari’s perspective: want to make the codebase more approachable for
> newcomers

 In what way? Newcomers need the Wiki page that basically tells them 
to "./autogen.sh --enable-dbgutil && make", which is neither that difficult 
nor would Meson make it noticeably simpler. Probably the only 
non-approachable parts of the build system is solenv/gbuild, which is not for 
newcomers, and touching that would be similar to hacking on Meson internals, 
which presumably is also not for newcomers.

>     + understand that we don’t want to drop something that works already
> (Ilmari) + not yet asking for a decision, but please think about this
>     + what problem does this solve? (Kendy)
>       + usually LO breaks the tools
>     + GNOME / wayland is moving to this from autotools (Ilmari)
>     + sitting on the fence (Thorsten)
>       + significant cost to migrate to anything
>       + there are load of unsolved problems with the build system, though

 Is there a list somewhere?

>     + would not be great to pay some external developers to do the
> migration and then let us maintain it (Stephan)
> + agreed (Kendy, Cloph) 
>     + better spend funding money elsewhere (Kendy)
>       + e.g. external libs that can’t build in parallel

-- 
 Luboš Luňák
 l.lunak at collabora.com