[Mesa-dev] Lets talk about autotools

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 12:44 PM, Dylan Baker <dylan at pnwbakers.com> wrote:
> 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.

I remember there was a particularly egregious failure mode for meson
where running "meson configure help" would fail if any of the
dependencies were missing for whatever the default was. Has that been
resolved? I'd also encourage writing a new "configure" script which
echo's instructions on how to operate meson -- it's really not
obvious, with alternating --prefix=bla -Dfoo=bla argument styles.
People know how to use autotools, but meson is a fairly new thing.

Cheers,

  -ilia