[Mesa-dev] last call for autotools

[Jason Ekstrand]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 11:25 AM Andre Heider <a.heider at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 14/12/2018 17:53, Dylan Baker wrote:
> > Quoting Gert Wollny (2018-12-14 03:44:32)
> >> Am Montag, den 10.12.2018, 15:10 -0800 schrieb Dylan Baker:
> >> (2) It would be nice if Meson would distribute some default cross build
> >> files, currently everybody has to roll its own, and I guess in the end
> >> they all look mostly the same.
> >
> > Please ask your distro to write and distribute the cross files. It's
> simply
> > impossible for meson to distribute them for a huge number of reasons, but
> > basically it boils down to too many distros with too many differences. I
> have
> > done basically everything I can (personally) to make this easier,
> including
> > adding support for loading cross files from XDG paths
> (/usr/share/meson/cross,
> > etc)
> >
> >>
> >> (3) I also noted that with across build one has to set the library
> >> install directory manually, because it defaults to the directory used
> >> for the build machine - i.e. a i386 cross build on debian amd64 should
> >> set the lib install directory on Debian to "lib/i386-linux-gnu" but it
> >> sets it to "lib/x86_64-linux-gnu"
> >
> > There is this issue: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/4008
> >
> > This is another case that is really hard to handle because of the way
> different
> > distros have handled installing x86 and x86_64 binaries on the same OS.
> To name
> > a few:
> > debian : lib/$gnu-tri/
> > arch   : lib/ + lib32/
> > fedora : lib64/ + lib32/
> >
> > I'm sure there are more, but getting that right all of the time is
> actually
> > pretty hard. I'll look into it.
>
> It's not just the libdir, there's no real way for a project to provide
> all the required cross settings so it works everywhere. Like the
> pkg-config binary name for e.g. cross-compiling 32bit binaries. I didn't
> find anything user friendly, so I worked around that on another project
> [0]. And I'm sure there's more.
>
> While all that is doable, it is annoying. Isn't there any way for meson
> to provide a standard set of cross files for distros? If it's the
> distro's responsibility to provide these without any guidelines it's
> just going to be another mess, because either a distro doesn't at all or
> they all do it differently.
>

I think it's very easy to mistake the way autotools handles things for
somehow being easier.  For quite some time now, Fedora has carried a
patched version of autools which has a special case to automatically
redirects you to lib64 if --prefix=/usr.  It's horrible because it means
that autotools behaves differently with every other possible prefix unless
you manually set libdir.  If they're going to carry patches against
autotools, they can carry a meson cross file.  Autotools is only "easier"
because distros have beat on it with a hammer until it mostly works.

--Jason
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