[Mesa-dev] Lets talk about autotools

[Emil Velikov]

Hi Chuck,

On 20 September 2018 at 16:03, Chuck Atkins <chuck.atkins at kitware.com> wrote:
> ...
>>
>> Distributions already explicitly specify what they want and most of
>> our autodetection is effectively a bad copy of that.
>
>
> The big difference vs gnome is that *most* gnome packages are consumed by
> users only as system libraries and thus package maintainers are the ones
> build them, so it's not a big deal to have to explicitly configure it how
> you want.  Seldom will you have a miscelaneous user needing to build and use
> thier own version of GNOME libs.  Mesa, on the other hand, has an extensive
> set of users just like that. A substantial portion of mesa's user base are
> graphics developers that have no idea what most of the mesa options are or
> what they do, but just need to have a new mesa build to fix a bug their
> OpenGL code is hitting.  As much as dealing with the "auto" implementation
> sucks, I think it's important that the default out-of-the-box with no
> arguments configuration should be sane and likely to produce something
> useful, even if not optimal.
>
As you've noticed in the thread, experienced devs have script(s) which
adjust the defaults/autodetection to fit their needs.

One thing I've always told people unfamiliar with the process:
Start with the dependencies+toggles that your distribution uses. Then
work up/down.

On Debian that's as trivial as "build-deps" on others - perhaps less no.

That said, I tend to read through the toggles and disable things I do not need.
Guess I'm one of the few ;-)

Either way, autotools is ok on the topic. We'll get to see any missing
corner cases in meson sooner or later.

HTH
Emil