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

[Lionel Landwerlin]

On 19/12/2018 17:19, Kenneth Graunke wrote:
> 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

I very much agree with Ken here.
Autotools has been a pain to deal with especially since we had to 
maintain 2 build systems.
We already have part of our tools that do not get built with Autotools. 
I think the main reason being that debugging Meson builds is a lot 
faster that Autotools ones.
So I would be happy if we could send a signal that this will go soon and 
strongly recommend users to tell us what isn't working.

Just finally adding that pretty big projects like systemd (only uses 
Meson), GLib (both Meson/Autotools, but Meson default) and a bunch of 
other Gnome stuff is now being built with Meson in major distros (just 
checked Debian which also builds Mesa using Meson), so it seems to me at 
least a significant part of the community won't be very surprised.
And this patch is the call for people who haven't noticed yet.

Acked-by: Lionel Landwerlin <lionel.g.landwerlin at intel.com>

-
Lionel