[Mesa-dev] Lets talk about autotools

[Jason Ekstrand]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 2:45 PM Matt Turner <mattst88 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 2:28 AM Gert Wollny <gw.fossdev at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Am Donnerstag, den 29.11.2018, 17:44 +0000 schrieb Emil Velikov:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > I can see why people may opt to not use or maintain the autotools
> > > build. Although I would kindly ask that we do not remove it just yet.
> >
> > I second that, I think the process of removing autotools should be a
> > two-step procedure. i.e. prior to ripping autotools support out there
> > should be one or two releases that deprecates it, e.g. by changing
> > configure that it (1) needs an extra flag to run, and (2) when run
> > without this flag it would just print a message about the meson build
> > system, the deprecation of autotools (making it clear when it will be
> > removed), and information how to still run autotools with this extra
> > flag. If qwe
> >
> > A rationale is that with a release that only has mesa there is a high
> > chance that people not directly involved with the project, and that
> > don't follow git but only use the releases hit corner cases when
> > building mesa that we or maintainers for distributions might not be
> > aware of. Still having something around that is known to work would be
> > good for them, so they can report a bug against the meson build system
> > and still get their work done by easily switching to the autotools for
> > the time being.
>
> I've been using Meson to build Mesa in Gentoo for a ~6 months now, and
> I've reported (and Dylan has fixed) a handful of corner case bugs.
> Dylan is super responsive, usually having a fix within a day. It's
> been great, really.
>
> And we've been discussing removing autotools for more than a year now.
>
> I think we've been plenty conservative and there's nothing to be
> gained / no problems to be avoided by delaying further. (And again, if
> someone comes out of the woodwork with a bug in the Meson build, Dylan
> will fix it within a day in my experience)
>

I fully agree.  If we wait another 6 months, someone will make exactly the
same argument because surely there's someone out there who hasn't tried out
meson yet.  The only way to force every one of our users to give meson a
try and report the last handful of bugs is to delete autotools from the
tree.  It's been very stable for some time now; let's just pull the trigger.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/attachments/20181130/25f7cb39/attachment.html>