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

[Kenneth Graunke]

On Wednesday, December 19, 2018 8:10:49 AM PST Eric Engestrom wrote:
> 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>

Eric's reasoning here makes sense.  In case there is anyone out there
who has been putting off trying Meson, this will properly exhort them
to try it, and identify any problems, yet still let them continue using
their old system for a little while longer.

Acked-by: Kenneth Graunke <kenneth at whitecape.org>

I've been using Meson for a long time, and it is dramatically better to
work with - both to write, and to use.  It is a little bit different,
and that took some getting used to.  But it was absolutely worth it.

We need a way to make progress here.  Matt's concern is very valid -
people can simply keep moving the goal posts.  And that's incredibly
frustrating for the people doing the work.

Given that we've had the Meson build system for over a year, I think
time is up.  Marek once received review feedback to a patch a year after
he wrote it, and he responded with something like "I've moved on, feel
free to write a patch."  I think that applies here.  The Meson build has
had many contributors at this point.  If it's not good enough, feel free
to help fix it.  It's worth noting that it is good enough for the major
distros, which have switched, and a large portion of the community uses
it exclusively.  Dylan has done a ton of work to upstream Meson to
address our needs and improve the usability of the project.  The rest
of the Meson developers have been very responsible as well.  We have
every reason to believe it will keep getting better.

We can't keep kicking the autotools can down the road indefinitely.
We need a forcing function like this patch, then eventual removal.
Expecting new contributors to write 4 build systems is just...bad.
I'm hopeful that we can get down to two (Meson and Android) soon.

For what it's worth, I'm hoping to merge Iris soon, and it does not have
an autotools build system, nor do I intend to write one.  At that point,
you won't be able to build the new Intel OpenGL drivers with autotools.

--Ken
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