[Mesa-dev] last call for autotools

[Gert Wollny]

Am Freitag, den 14.12.2018, 01:19 -0500 schrieb 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/

I think that was fixed with this PR (although I so far I didn't try to
use this new feature, so I don't know how well it works):
  https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/4356
The error message should probably be updated accordingly. 

[...]
> 
> 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.

I second that, I voiced my concerns in a former thread, especially that
so far this upcoming change has not been officially announced in the
release notes or on mesa-user, and that I don't understand why it is so
urgent to drop autotools when there is still someone who offers to
maintain it and some who prefer to use it.

What I wanted to add: Dylan, you did a great job in adding meson and
getting it to the point where it is now, please don't see it in any way
as an attempt to diminish your achievment here that some of us are
reluctant to drop autotools.

Just look at how long it takes to allow c++11 in the whole of mesa's
C++ code. I think not even now it is official that -std=c++11 can be
assumed for all mesa c++ code, and there is still one build config in
travis that uses gcc 4.7 that supports the flag -std=c++11, but is
actually missing some features of c++11, so even now, by the end of
2018 one can not fully use c++11, and most compilers already default to
c++14. I understand the need for some to use older compilers, so I
don't complain about this. AFAICS meson actually defaults to -std=c++11
on the whole C++ code base, so from that point of view I'm actually in
favour of making it the preferred build system, I just don't see the
need to remove autotools already.

Cheers, 
Gert