[Mesa-dev] Drop scons for 20.1?

Wed Feb 26 21:03:50 UTC 2020

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 12:16 PM Jose Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com> wrote:
>
> > but it bothers me how we keep not making a decision on this. If we'd said, "let's keep it and support it", that would something.
>
> I'm surprised there's any doubt.
>
> SCons works great for us.   Meson gives no immediate benefit for us other than headaches.  If we cared about nothing but ourselves, we'd keep SCons indefinitely, until it became a pain.
>
> The only reason we don't stubbornly put the foot down is that we understand that having one single build system would be beneficial the whole community, and of course we appreciate all the work Dylan and others did to get Meson to work on Windows, so we'd like to get there one day.
>
> That said, I don't understand why the rest of the Mesa community putting a gun against our head to abandon SCons.
>
> Aren't we maintaining the SCons build?  Since when in Mesa community are some entitled to start remove code that still works, is used, and maintained by others!!!!????

Nobody is entitled to remove the code, that's why we're having this
discussion. And I bet it's frustrating for you to have to deal with
this again and again, but on the other side, it's frustrating to see
this issue come up again and again with no evident progress
whatsoever. What has happened on your side since the last time this
was discussed? When is that "one day"? How are we supposed to move
this forward without bringing it up?

As for removing code that works - we do that All. The. Time. We
refactor subsystems, IRs, entire drivers get rewritten and replace the
working code that was there before, in order the lower the maintenance
burden, run across more platforms, shader a compiler pass, reduce
techincal debt etc.

Kristian

>
> Jose
>
> ________________________________
> From: Kristian Høgsberg <hoegsberg at gmail.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2020 18:37
> To: Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net>
> Cc: Rob Clark <robdclark at gmail.com>; mesa-dev <mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org>; Dylan Baker <baker.dylan.c at gmail.com>; Jose Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com>; Brian Paul <brianp at vmware.com>
> Subject: Re: [Mesa-dev] Drop scons for 20.1?
>
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 8:15 PM Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> wrote:
> >
> > +Jose & Brian
> >
> > I'm not personally opposed but I also can't remember the last time I had to
> > fix the scons build. I think it's been years. Maybe that's because I don't
> > work on GL anymore? In any case, I don't know that it's really costing us
> > that much given that basically none of the drivers actually build with it.
> > But fat meh, I guess.
>
> Maybe it is a bit meh... I did the MR to remove SCons and it's smaller
> that I thought it would be:
>
> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgitlab.freedesktop.org%2Fmesa%2Fmesa%2F-%2Fmerge_requests%2F3955&data=02%7C01%7Cjfonseca%40vmware.com%7C6b2e8f2abc98458d18ad08d7baeb0443%7Cb39138ca3cee4b4aa4d6cd83d9dd62f0%7C0%7C1%7C637183390863817583&sdata=96lM4flW9ja6fJG95nlNdmftNiYpajxpg0Il850%2FDLk%3D&reserved=0
>
> but it bothers me how we keep not making a decision on this. If we'd
> said, "let's keep it and support it", that would something. But
> whenever it comes up, Dylan maybe fixes something on the windows
> build, we talk about trying to switch Windows to meson and then...
> nothing.
>
> Also, we've had this unfortunate split between Linux and Windows build
> systems where autotools suck on Windows and nobody on Unix ever had a
> reason to use SCons.  With meson we've picked something that's a
> legitimate improvement on both sides, get's us back to one build
> system and done more than due dilligence to make it work on Windows
> and we're not taking the last step because... meh?
>
> Kristian
>
> > --Jason
> >
> > On February 25, 2020 21:56:30 Rob Clark <robdclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > It looks like we have 4 scons build jobs in CI.. I'm not sure how much
> > > that costs us, but I guess those cycles could be put to better use?
> > > So even ignoring the developer-cycles issue (ie. someone making
> > > changes that effects scons build, and has to setup a scons build env
> > > to fix breakage of their MR) I guess there is at least an argument to
> > > remove scons from CI.  Whether it is worth keeping a dead build system
> > > after it is removed from CI is an issue that I'm ambivalent about.
> > >
> > > BR,
> > > -R
> > >
> > > On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 3:42 PM Kristian Høgsberg <hoegsberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> It's been a while since Dylan did the work to make meson support
> > >> Windows and there's been plenty of time to provide feedback or improve
> > >> argue why we still need scons. I haven't seen any such discussion and
> > >> I think we've waited long enough.
> > >>
> > >> Let's drop scons for the next release and move things forward?
> > >>
> > >> Kristian
> > >> _______________________________________________
> > >> mesa-dev mailing list
> > >> mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org
> > >> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.freedesktop.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fmesa-dev&data=02%7C01%7Cjfonseca%40vmware.com%7C6b2e8f2abc98458d18ad08d7baeb0443%7Cb39138ca3cee4b4aa4d6cd83d9dd62f0%7C0%7C1%7C637183390863817583&sdata=d40ceGVLhyahNydLEZ55P7hgjqeLtIOMKN6J0NPmfwE%3D&reserved=0
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > mesa-dev mailing list
> > > mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org
> > > https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.freedesktop.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fmesa-dev&data=02%7C01%7Cjfonseca%40vmware.com%7C6b2e8f2abc98458d18ad08d7baeb0443%7Cb39138ca3cee4b4aa4d6cd83d9dd62f0%7C0%7C1%7C637183390863817583&sdata=d40ceGVLhyahNydLEZ55P7hgjqeLtIOMKN6J0NPmfwE%3D&reserved=0
> >
> >
> >