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

[Rob Clark]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 4:10 PM, Dylan Baker <dylan at pnwbakers.com> wrote:
> Quoting Rob Clark (2017-03-22 10:07:54)
>> I guess an interesting question (from someone who doesn't know meson
>> yet) would be whether meson could slurp in the Makefile.sources type
>> stuff that we have, which are shared so far between
>> android/scons/autotools (and for the most part, kept developers from
>> having to care *too* much about the different build systems)
>
> Jason and I have talked about that too. I'd suggested that we could write a
> module for meson to read makefile.sources (since we're surely not the only
> project that would benefit from such a module), except that android is moving to
> blueprint[1] instead of android.mk files. As far as I can tell blueprint doesn't
> support using makefile.sources, so it seems somewhat moot in a world of
> blueprint for android, meson for *.

I guess even if it is only a temporary thing, something that could
slurp in Makefile.sources seems like it would be useful for a
transition period.

I'm not totally up to speed on android/blueprint stuff.. but even some
simplified or different "here-are-my-sources" type file that could be
shared across build systems would be useful.  Meson sounds a bit more
extensible so maybe there is some potential to adapt to whatever
android forces on us ;-)


> I don't think that meson should try to generate blueprint files, since blueprint
> is itself a metabuild system that generates ninja files, and is self
> boot-strapping Go code. I don't know if the community is going to want blueprint
> to live in repo either, since one actually writes Go code for the build system.
> (I'm not objecting prematurely, I'm just pointing out that the design is
> significantly different the Android.mk, and the community will probably want to
> re-evaluate)
>
> If android doesn't mandate a migration to blueprint, or blueprint does handle
> makefile.sources (I don't think it does), I'd be happy to propose a module for
> meson that could read makefile.sources, and write said module, and get said
> module upstream.

I guess from my PoV with my developer hat on, as long as simple things
like adding/removing src files to an existing .so or .a require just
editing one build file for all build systems, that pretty much
guarantees that I don't forget to update one and anger
windows/android/$other_random_thing builders ;-)

(with my $enterprise_distro hat on, I think *probably* the main thing
is that we don't drop autotools build support before
gnome/gstreamer/etc.. not 100% sure about the py3 dependency but I
guess if we aren't the only one that needs it to build, that helps..)

BR,
-R