[Spice-devel] [PATCH RFC] Support for building with Meson

[Christophe de Dinechin]

Hi Eduardo,


Thanks for sharing.

Out of curiosity, I understand why you want to add Meson, but why remove autotools right away?

In my c3d build branch, I made sure both make and autotools could coexist.

> ddd at ptitpuce[c3d-build] spice> make help
> Specific top-level target:
>   make gitclean		: Cleanup recursively using git clean
>   make restore		: Restore the c3d/build build system
> Using autoconf:
>   ./autogen.sh		: Run autoconf in all submodules
>   ./autogen.sh 'make -j'	: Run autogen and make submodules
>   (After this, 'make' builds using auto-generated makefiles)
> Available targets:
>   make                : Build default target (TARGET=opt)
>   make all            : Same
>   make debug          : Debug build
>   make opt            : Optimized build with debug info
>   make release        : Release build without debug info
>   make profile        : Profile build


I believe it’s desirable to keep the historical system at least for a while. Any reason not to (except as a proof of concept that you can build without)?


Thanks


> On 22 Mar 2018, at 18:18, Eduardo Lima (Etrunko) <etrunko at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> Here is the result of work in progress with replacing autotools with
> Meson. I am sending the patches on the ML for easier visualization, but
> if you want to try it, I would really recommend pulling from my gitlab
> repositories, e.g.:
> 
>  $ git remote add etrunko https://gitlab.com/etrunko/spice-protocol
>  $ git remote add etrunko https://gitlab.com/etrunko/spice-common
>  $ git remote add etrunko https://gitlab.com/etrunko/spice-server
> 
> The development branch is named meson for all repositories.
> 
> - Requirements:
> 
> Python >= 3.5, as required by meson itself.
> 
> The required Meson version is 0.45.0, which includes some interesting
> features for the specific use case of subprojects, just like
> spice-common.
> 
> Recent distros are probably still lagging behind on the package version,
> but there is an easy way to upgrade meson, by installing a new version
> on your $HOME/.local directory with python 'pip'.
> 
>  $ pip3 install --upgrade --user meson
> 
> After downloading the meson package, it is necessary to tell python
> where to find it, via the PYTHONPATH environment variable.
> 
>  $ export PYTHONPATH='$HOME/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages
> 
> Then you are ready to go.
> 
> - Basic workflow:
> 
> With Meson, building in-tree is not possible at all, so we need to pass
> a directory as argument to meson where we want the build to be done.
> This has the advantage of creating builds with different options under
> the same parent directory, e.g.:
> 
>  $ meson ./build --prefix=/usr
>  $ meson ./build-extra -Dextra-checks=true -Dalignment-checks=true
> 
> This is equivalent to the autogen/configure step in autotools. Meson
> itself is only responsible for the configure phase, where it creates
> the files that will be used by another lower level build-system, which
> will actually do the build. The default one is ninja.
> 
>  $ ninja -C ./build
>  $ ninja -C ./build install
> 
> Ninja defaults to parallel builds, and this can be changed with the -j
> flag.
> 
>  $ ninja -j 10 -C ./build
> 
> - Done:
> 
> Protocol, common and server.
> 
> - Missing:
> 
>  * Server:
>    - tests need to be adjusted so the executable can run in a path
>      other than the source files.
>    - version generation with git-version-gen if building from tarball.
>      IMHO, git-version-gen could be removed.
>    - Checks (syntax, etc), in maint.mk and cfg.mk, that are done whith
>      make distcheck.
> 
>  * Spice Gtk:
>    - Work in progress, but it will not interfere as much with other
>      projects, especially spice-common, as server did. When ready to be
>      used I will follow the same structure as others.
> 
> - Hacking:
> 
> Meson has a python-like syntax and it is very well documented. The key
> files are:
> 
>  * meson.build: Mandatory for the project root and usually found under
>                 each directory you want something to be built.
> 
>  * meson_options.txt: Options that can interfere with the result of the
>                       build.
> 
> For more details, please refer to the websites of each project:
> 
>  http://mesonbuild.com
>  http://ninja-build.org
> 
> --
> Eduardo de Barros Lima (Etrunko)
> Software Engineer - RedHat
> etrunko at redhat.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Spice-devel mailing list
> Spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/spice-devel