[Mesa-dev] last call for autotools

[Ilia Mirkin]

I have to say that the user experience for autotools is WAY better
than for meson. As a concrete example, I had a meson build. Then I
updated meson (0.48.1 to 0.48.2). Now ninja -C foo doesn't work. meson
--reconfigure (which presumably is what ninja would end up running)
doesn't work. http://paste.debian.net/hidden/cf777f3e/

So now what? I don't remember how that config was done, except that it
was done the way I decided I needed it at the time. I have no way to
recover it. With autotools, in such cases (which are immensely rare),
you just run "head config.log" and it tells you what you did last
time. And by updating the build component, now I have to rebuild
EVERYTHING?

meson is not at a point where it Just Works. It ... sometimes works.
The fact that everyone has scripts which wrap meson is a symptom of
that. I don't feel good about dumping the system that everyone (and I
don't just mean people on this list -- I mean the wider open source
community as well) knows how to use and has worked reliably for years
(decades, really) to be replaced by a system that everyone is having
problems with (it's not just me -- others are running into trouble too
-- just look at this thread). It's just not ready yet.

  -ilia

On Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 6:11 PM Dylan Baker <dylan at pnwbakers.com> wrote:
>
> Meson 0.49.0 has been out for a couple of days now, and I'd like to make the
> final call for autotools. My patch is so massive that it's a huge pain to send
> to the list, the latest versions is here:
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/dbaker/mesa/commits/delete-autotools
>
> Dylan
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