ESC meeting minutes: 2020-02-13

[Ilmari Lauhakangas]

Luboš Luňák kirjoitti 13.2.2020 klo 19.57:
> 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.

By "newcomers" I mean everyone without solid experience with writing 
makefiles. On my own part I remember the frustration when wrestling with 
the Help content htmlisation. I had to give up and wait for gbuild/make 
gurus to solve everything and I was not the only one. Not a very 
efficient way of working.

I will get back to this after interviewing people involved in autotools 
-> Meson migrations, so we have something more concrete to chew on.

Ilmari