[Mesa-dev] Lets talk about autotools

[Emil Velikov]

Hi all,

On Thu, 29 Nov 2018 at 17:44, Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I can see why people may opt to not use or maintain the autotools build.
> Although I would kindly ask that we do not remove it just yet.
>
> In Mesa, we have different parts not used by different teams. As such
> we tend to remove stuff when nobody is around to maintain it anymore.
>
> That said, I'm planning to continue maintaining it and would appreciate
> if we keep it in-tree.
>
> As people may be concerned about bugreports and alike we can trivially
> add a warning (as configure is invoked) to forwards any issues to my
> email. Additionally (or alternatively) we can have an autotools bugzilla
> category with me as the default assignee.
>

Seems like I failed to make things clear enough with earlier message.

There is _no_ expectation for anyone to touch or even look at autotools.
Hence, my suggestion to have configure.ac point people to me in case of issues.

If people have CI that uses it - feel free to drop it.


That said, many have asked why I'd go through the pain of maintaining it:
 - Most Linux distributions have switched, but there'still a few outstanding
 - Non Linux distributions have not switched
 - The meson build is missing features, relative the autotools one
 - I've been approached by individuals, who cannot quite yet use meson


That said, if you guys want to remove it - so be it.

Thanks
Emil