[Mesa-dev] Lets talk about autotools

[Matt Turner]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 9:47 AM Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
> In Mesa, we have different parts not used by different teams. As such
> we tend to remove stuff when nobody is around to maintain it anymore.

We drop things for that reason, but also when something is no longer
needed. I don't think autotools is needed. As far as I know all
distributions have switched to Meson quite some time ago. I just
removed the last version of Mesa from Gentoo that we were still
building with autotools.

> That said, I'm planning to continue maintaining it and would appreciate
> if we keep it in-tree.

If it were a driver for some old hardware that you wanted to maintain
I would be sympathetic. But this is an enormous build system that is
going to increase overhead for everyone, and for unclear benefit.

FWIW, git stats on git rm `find -name Makefile.am` configure.ac are

 105 files changed, 10872 deletions(-)

and I bet that's not all that could be removed.

That's the same order of maginitude as nouveau vieux or classic
radeon, and a lot more overhead than both.