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

[Eric Engestrom]

On Wednesday, 2018-12-19 10:32:44 -0500, Ilia Mirkin 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.

The point of this patch is for people to not be able to ignore this, and
have to become aware of the existence of Meson and our intention to
remove autotools, whenever this may happen.

Some people have already noticed, probably because they keep up with
mesa-dev@, but the point is that some people haven't.

Without this patch:
- people will continue being unaware, until
- autotools gets removed, and these people are going to try their
  use-cases, and probably find issues
- issues will get fixed, hopefully quickly, but blocking them completely
  in the mean time

With this patch:
- people will *have to notice* that something's changing
- they'll choose to either ignore it, use the flag, and *choose* to go
  with the option above
- or they can choose to try meson, get any issues fixed *while still
  being able to work with their old setup in the mean time*

This last bit is the entire point of this patch, so let me repeat it:
people will report meson issues while there's still time to use their
old autotools setup.

I'm definitely in favour:
Acked-by: Eric Engestrom <eric.engestrom at intel.com>