[Mesa-dev] Lets talk about autotools

[Dylan Baker]

Quoting Chuck Atkins (2018-09-18 08:00:44)
> First, I'm fully in support of killing off autotools woo-hoo to that.  And
> given the substantial investment already put into the meson build that
> certainly seems like a good direction to go.
> 
> That being said, the way "auto" is currently implemented leaves quite a bit to
> be desired.  One of the nice features of the Autotools build was how
> auto-enabled options were treated in that the dependencies were searched for
> and if they were all found and met then the option would be enabled.  My
> experience so far with the meson build has shown this not to be the case and a
> "configure" with no options has yet to be successful for me.  Many of the
> 'auto' options are treated as 'set to true if your platform supports it'
> regardless of whether your system has the requisite dependencies available. 
> For example"
> 
>   • The 'gallium-va' option defaults to 'auto' but the implementation ends up
>     setting the '_va' option to true if the other option conditions are met,
>     long before libva is searched for.  So then when libva isn't found one gets
>     an error.
>       □ if set to auto then missing the libva dependencies should be a failure,
>         it should just disable the gallium va state tracker

This is a bug I noticed earlier, I think I have a patch for it I just never sent
out apparently. I've send that out now.

>   • The platform options set to 'auto'  has a set of checks to determine which
>     platforms are enabled as required.  If the system_has_kms_drm check is true
>     then Wayland is enabled as required.  Later if the check for wayland
>     dependencies fails, an error occurs.
>       □ If platforms are set to auto then a failure to locate dependencies for
>         a given platform should disable the platform.
> 
> I realize these are just two specific examples, each of which can be readily
> dealt with in their own specific way so I'm not asking "how to I address #1 and
> #2?" because I can certainly do that.  These are just two instances of many
> though in the way "auto" is dealt with.  My point is really a broader one that
> before meson becomes the primary build then the behavior of "auto" should
> create a successful configure out of the box without additional options. 

This is a much harder thing to fix, I'll look into it, but it'll take at least a
few days to get this done.

> 
> ----------
> Chuck Atkins
> Staff R&D Engineer, Scientific Computing
> Kitware, Inc.
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 9:04 AM Eric Engestrom <eric.engestrom at intel.com>
> wrote:
> 
>     On Monday, 2018-09-17 17:25:36 -0400, Marek Olšák wrote:
>     > Where do I find default values for meson configure options?
> 
>     If you mean the project's options, they're in meson_options.txt;
>     currently not printed in the output of `meson configure` though.
> 
>     If you mean Meson's own options (like `buildtype`), I don't think that
>     information exists anywhere outside of Meson's source code (and it's
>     affected by meson.build too).
> 
>     It might be worth opening an issue upstream to ask for and track the
>     progress of this feature if you want it :)
> 
>     >
>     > Thanks,
>     > Marek
>     >
>     > 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.
>     > >
>     > > Dylan
>     > >
>     > > _______________________________________________
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>     > > mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org
>     > > https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
>     > >
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