[Mesa-dev] [PATCH] autotools: Deprecate the use of autotools

[Jason Ekstrand]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 9:32 AM Ilia Mirkin <imirkin at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 10:25 AM Matt Turner <mattst88 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 8:06 AM Ilia Mirkin <imirkin at alum.mit.edu>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 1:01 AM Matt Turner <mattst88 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > > WTF would you have us do?
> > >
> > > Same thing as for any change with an impact this wide --
> > >
> > > 1. Identify stakeholders. In this case, probably the sub-project
> > > maintainers, major contributors, and a smattering of distro
> > > maintainers.
> > > 2. Make them happy, or at least get them, as a group, to agree that
> > > it's "good enough".
> >
> > So we're trying to get better coverage than what you're suggesting.
> >
> > > 3. Apply.
> > >
> > > This is the point at which you can make autotools less visible. We're
> > > not at that point yet.
> >
> > Ilia, it's an extra flag. I think you'll survive.
>
> It's an advertising strategy for meson (hello world, check this out,
> it's going to be the default soon). It can be done at the final stage.
> We're not at that stage.
>
> We're at the stage of "hello community, we'd like to replace
> autotools", and the community coming back to you with feedback.
>

I disagree.  I think we were at that stage 6-8 months ago and a bunch of
the community didn't come back with feedback until we sent a patch to
delete autotools.  Identify stakeholders?  Done; the distros are all cool
with it or have already switched.  Agree it's "good enough"?  We thought
we'd done that and then people raised issues at the 11th hour.  Even with
those issues, the ones that are real issues with meson are all in-progress
to fix.  The others are just "make it look like autotools so I can pretend
meson doesn't exist".  Please pardon my frustration but we thought we'd
done our due diligence and it wasn't until we took a step very much like
this one that we actually got feedback from certain people such as
yourself.  To say that we're only now getting to the "hello community, we'd
like to replace autotools" stage is a bit disingenuous.

That said, that doesn't mean I think this patch is the right way to go.  I
think the referenced e-mail conversaion has flushed out enough of the
remaining issues that we need to fix a couple of remaining things in meson
and then just delete autotools.  Maybe this means that autotools stays
around for one more release but then I think we should just can it without
bothering with the extra deprecation step.

--Jason
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