[Mesa-dev] Lets talk about autotools

[Mathieu Bridon]

On Mon, 2018-09-17 at 20:56 -0400, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
> 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.

During its (still unfinished) transition to Meson, the GNOME project
has successfully used configure scripts for compatibility with the
autotools build API.

See this one for example: 
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/json-glib/blob/8b6c216d60e1d54d9314c00931131fbfa7d15563/configure

With this, you can keep doing the usual ./configure; make; make install
dance and it uses Meson and Ninja under the hood (configure options are
translated to meson options, some work might be needed for custom
options)

It was used to not block the migration to Meson, yet keep building on
those platforms which didn't have Meson yet.

Maybe a similar transition could work for Mesa, temporarily?

Hope that helps,


-- 
Mathieu