[Mesa-dev] [PATCH] autotools: Deprecate the use of autotools

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Sat, Jan 12, 2019 at 9:40 AM Gert Wollny <gw.fossdev at gmail.com> wrote:
> I will not push it with
> the strong NAK you gave, Ilia. To me consensus means that all who
> contribute significantly to the project (like you certainly do) agree
> or abstain, but don't object.

A single actor should not prevent a group from adopting something he
doesn't like. Given that I had all the (in my consideration) major
issues that I did, I assumed that some others had run into them as
well and were equally (or at least partially) concerned. It seems like
that theory has not been borne out -- while I did get some private
feedback about this, no one seems to be publicly willing expend
political capital on this issue.

Perhaps my workflow is different, or perhaps my tolerance for BS is
lower. Probably some combination... I build for 3 different
cross-environments in addition to the native build (arm, arm64,
ppc64), and even x86_32 on the rare occasion. It all works out OK, and
I don't have to spend a ton of time remembering how each one works in
the intervening 6-12 months between each occasion that I spend time on
a particular platform. I suspect the majority of people just build one
thing and it's no trouble to remember how it works since you're doing
it every day.

A switch to meson will require a re-investment of time into figuring
out how to make those various cases work properly, and all the issues
I ran into with meson (no-longer-working build dirs, inability to
retrieve configuration args, etc) conspire to require that
reinvestment to happen each time rather than once-per-lifetime. But
perhaps these will be fixed by then? Let's hope.

Cheers,

  -ilia