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

[Eduardo Lima (Etrunko)]

On 23/03/18 07:51, Christophe de Dinechin wrote:
> 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.
> 


I knew it was going to cause confusion, but of course there is no
requirement to remove autotools right away, especially when there are
still some important bits missing. I was more interested in knowing the
diffstat.


>> 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)?
> 
> 

I strongly agree to keep them both, at least until we can do the build
the packages for RHEL, which I think it is still not possible.

> 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
> 


-- 
Eduardo de Barros Lima (Etrunko)
Software Engineer - RedHat
etrunko at redhat.com