<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Jose Fonseca <<a href="mailto:jfonseca@vmware.com" target="_blank">jfonseca@vmware.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5">On 24/03/17 20:08, Kristian Høgsberg wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 12:44 PM, Jose Fonseca <<a href="mailto:jfonseca@vmware.com" target="_blank">jfonseca@vmware.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On 24/03/17 19:10, Kristian Høgsberg wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 6:42 AM, Jose Fonseca <<a href="mailto:jfonseca@vmware.com" target="_blank">jfonseca@vmware.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On 23/03/17 01:38, Rob Clark wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Jonathan Gray <<a href="mailto:jsg@jsg.id.au" target="_blank">jsg@jsg.id.au</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 01:10:14PM -0700, Dylan Baker wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 12:40 PM, Alex Deucher <<a href="mailto:alexdeucher@gmail.com" target="_blank">alexdeucher@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I guess I'm a little late to the party here, but I haven't had time to really let all of this sink in and actually look at meson. It doesn't seem so bad with a quick look and I think I could probably sort it out when the time came, but there would still be a bit of a learning curve. While that may not be a big deal at the micro level, I have concerns at the macro level. First, I'm concerned it may discourage casual developers and packagers. autotools isn't great, but most people are familiar enough with it that they can get by. Most people have enough knowledge of autotools that they can pretty easily diagnose a configuration based failure. There are a lot of resources for autotools. I'm not sure that would be the case for meson. Do we as a community feel we have enough meson experience to get people over the hump? Anything that makes it harder for someone to try a new build or do a bisect is a big problem in my opinion. </blockquote> One of the things that's prompted this on our side (I've talked this over with other people at Intel before starting), was that clearly we *don't* know autotools well enough to get it right. Emil almost always finds cases were we've done things *almost*, but not quite right. For my part, it took me about 3 or 4 days of reading through the docs and writing the libdrm port to get it right, and a lot of that is just the boilerplate of having ~8 drivers that all need basically the same logic. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Next, my bigger concern is for distro and casual packagers and people that maintain large build systems with lots of existing custom configurations. Changing from autotools would basically require many of these existing tools and systems to be rewritten and then deal with the debugging and fall out from that. The potential decreased build time is a nice bonus, but frankly a lot of people/companies have years of investment in existing tools. </blockquote> Sure, but we're also not the only ones investigating meson. Gnome is using it already, libepoxy is using it, gstreamer is using it. There are patches for weston (written by Daniel Stone) and libinput (written by Peter Hutterer), there are some other projects in the graphics sphere that people are working on. So even if we as a community decide that meson isn't for us, it's not going away. </blockquote> It is worth pointing out that it is currently required by no component of an <a href="http://x.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">x.org</a> stack. In the case of libepoxy it was added by a new maintainer on a new release and even then autoconf remains. And as far as I can tell nothing in the entire OpenBSD ports tree currently requires meson to build including gnome and gstreamer. </blockquote> but I guess that is conflating two completely different topics.. addition of meson and removal of autotools. It is probably better that we treat the topics separately. I don't see any way that the two can happen at the same time. The autotools build probably needs to remain for at least a couple releases, and I certainly wouldn't mind if some of the other desktop projects took the leap of dropping autotools first (at least then various different "distro" consumers will have already dealt with how to build meson packages) None of that blocks addition of a meson build system (or what various developers use day to day) BR, -R </blockquote> I tend to disagree. While we can't avoid a transitory period, when we embark on another build system (Meson or something else) I think we should aim at 1) ensure such tool can indeed _completely_ replace at least _one_ existing build system, 2) and aim at migration quickly. Otherwise we'll just end up with yet another build system, yet another way builds can fail, with some developers stuck on old build systems because it works, or because the new build system quite doesn't work. And this is from (painful) experience. </blockquote> I agree, adding a meson build system should aim to phase out one of the other build systems within one or two release cycles. But (and maybe that was Robs point) that doesn't have be autotools. What if we phase out scons? It doesn't seem like anybody is really attached to it and if meson is as good as scons on windows, then if nothing else happens we end up with the same number of build systems. What's more likely to happen is that a lot of Linux developers (and CI systems) will also start using meson, which means that life gets easier for vmware wrt maintaining the build system, and easier for all developers who have spent to much of their life waiting for autogen.sh. Then decommissioning autotools can be a separate topic as Rob suggests, something we'll do when the world is ready. </blockquote> There's zero overlap between SCons build users and Meson experience, so I don't see how that would work. Who would lead the charge? </blockquote> It sounds like Dylan and the Intel team are interested in doing the meson work. If that's the case, then perhaps you (or other SCons users) would be willing to evaluate the result and see if it meets your requirements for a SCons replacement? Kristian </blockquote> </div></div> Evaluating is one thing. Actually migrating is another. Brian already said he'd take a look and evaluate. And I'll help in what I can. I agree we should all evaluate early. But I don't think that the proposal of first migrate scons to meson, then in a second separate step migrate autotools to meson, is viable. Like I said: there's no knowledge overlap. The two group of people -- the Meson and Windows experts -- will be chasing each other tails. And all that while, the build will continue to be broken or diverge because master dev will go on.</blockquote><div> </div><div>I don't think that's true. I think a decent number of *nix mesa devs will start using meson as their primary build system. Also, we'll definitely be using meson in our CI system because it's so much faster and we have a big workhorse of a build machine. Sure, there will be breakage, but I don't think it will be one-sided. </div></div> </div></div>