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

[Juan A. Suarez Romero]

On Fri, 2017-03-24 at 10:13 -0700, Dylan Baker wrote:
> Quoting Jose Fonseca (2017-03-24 06:42:18)
> > 
> > I tend to disagree.  While we can't avoid a transitory period, when we 
> > embark on another build system (Meson or something else) I think we 
> > should aim at 1) ensure such tool can indeed _completely_ replace at 
> > least _one_ existing build system, 2) and aim at migration quickly.
> > 
> > Otherwise we'll just end up with yet another build system, yet another 
> > way builds can fail, with some developers stuck on old build systems 
> > because it works, or because the new build system quite doesn't work.
> > 
> > And this is from (painful) experience.
> 
> I tend to agree. Meson is *nice* because it's faster than autotools, but it's
> simplicity and the fact that it works for windows and *nix systems is one of the
> best features. Having fewer build systems is better than more.
> 
> We had hoped that we could do one release with both autotools and meson, to give
> some of the fast moving linux distributions (Arch, Fedora, etc) a chance to help
> us iron out bugs, especially for pacakgers. I think it is important though to
> make a commitment for exactly when we're going to either migrate completely to
> meson, or abandon the attempt and revert it.
> 
> > So I think we should identify stake holders soon, collect requirements 
> > (OSes platforms, etc), make sure the prospective tool meets them, have 
> > all stakeholders collaborate on a prototype, them embark on mass migration.
> > 
> > That is, if this fails, let it fail early.  If it succeeds, may it 
> > succeed early.  Anything but a slow death / zombie life.
> 
> I have a branch that builds intel's Vulkan driver, I'm actively working to get
> intel's i965 dri driver and llvmpipe building and send that out as an RFC to
> mesa-dev. That should give us enough of mesa to evaluate the build system I
> hope (Since it touches all of the major mesa components [classic, gallium,
> neither]).
> 
> If other people are interested in collaborating I'd be happy to push the branch
> sooner so that others can look at it.
> 
> I also think it's worth talking to Eric (who said he's porting X to meson),
> Daniel Stone (who has patches to port weston to meson), and Peter Hutterer (who
> has patches to port libinput to meson). If they're serious about seeing those
> land meson is even more appealing, since it would be a single build system that
> all of the *nix graphics stack would be moving towards, and would mean that we
> wouldn't have an "Autotools for xorg", "meson for weston and libinput", "cmake for
> piglit", and "<other build system> for mesa".
> 

Some months ago I've also ported a module used in GNOME (grilo) to
Meson.

Faster-than-light when building is awesome. But the feature I can't
stress enough is how much simple and intuitive is working with Meson.
Everything looks quite more natural. And authors are very supportive.


> > BTW, how about migrating mesademos to Meson?  It currently has autotools 
> > and cmake.  I was hoping that cmake would replace autotools, but I 
> > couldn't run fast enough, so I couldn't practice what preached above, 
> > hence cmake doing almost but not all what autotools does.
> > 
> > And is not a crucial project for Linux distros -- few distros package it 
> > -- and even if they do, no other package would depend on it.  And is one 
> > of those sort of projects that should be easy to port to any build too.
> 
> That's definitely doable, but most distros do package it, it's where glxgears,
> and more importantly glxinfo live.
> 
> I'll have a look at it and see. At the very least we should be able to drop
> cmake since I very much doubt anyone but you guys use it.
> 
> > Even if we ignore everything else, just replacing autotools + cmake with 
> > just one thing would be a net win.
> > 
> > 
> > Jose
> 
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