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

[Daniel Stone]

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'.

> 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.

Cheers,
Daniel