[Mesa-dev] Lets talk about autotools

[Matt Turner]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 1:13 AM Timo Aaltonen <tjaalton at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> On 17.11.2018 6.04, Dylan Baker wrote:
> > Quoting Dylan Baker (2018-09-17 09:44:07)
> >> I feel like for !windows meson is in good enough shape at this point that we
> >> can start having the discussion about deleting the autotools build. So, is there
> >> anything left that autotools can do that meson cannot (that we actually want to
> >> implement)? And, what is a reasonable time-table to remove the autotools build?
> >> I think we could reasonably remove it as soon as 18.3 if others felt confident
> >> that it would work for them.
> >>
> >> Dylan
> >
> > Okay, time for an update on things and a chance to talk about what else we need.
> >
> > Support for llvm-config (and any binary, actually) overriding has landed in
> > meson, and will be present in the 0.49.0 release, which is due out December 9th.
>
> Hi, just a note that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ships with meson 0.45.1 and will
> get Mesa backports up until and including 20.0.x, so I wonder how
> complex these required new features in meson are to be backported, or
> perhaps easily worked around? Backporting a whole new version of meson
> might not happen..

I understand the LTS concept, but what's the value in never upgrading
something like a build tool like Meson? Yeah, new versions give a
possibility of regressions, but with something evolving as quickly as
Meson the version available in April 2018 becomes less useful for its
intended purpose with each passing month...