[RFC PATCH 0/8] Meson build system [for libinput this time]

[Daniel Stone]

Hey Peter,

On 7 December 2016 at 22:33, Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 04:59:39PM +0000, Daniel Stone wrote:
>> [meson is like totally super duper]
>
> I tried the same for libinput, work available in
> https://github.com/whot/libinput/tree/wip/meson
> I think I'm about 80% of the way there, with more testing needed and a few
> details being different/missing.

Neat!

I think you need to filter the compiler flags list with
cc.has_argument() to work everywhere - but this is true of
Wayland/Weston as well. You could also replace the has_paired_device()
check with cc.has_function('libwacom_has_paired_device', dependencies:
dep_libwacom).

0.36.0 also lets you get rid of some of the more ugly
'@0@/bar'.format(foo) with join_paths(foo, '/bar') instead. I'm going
to update Wayland/Weston to make use of this

include_directories('.') for libinput shouldn't be needed - I assume
this is just there to pick up libinput-version.h, which you can do
instead by adding libinput_version_h to the libinput sources list.

Are you sure this generates the right soversion for libinput? It looks
like you've got args from libtool's -version-info (something I never
quite managed to figure out), whereas Meson just takes the soversion
directly (a la libtool -version-number).

The rest looks good to me!

> benchmark results are below, but they're more limited than the weston one.
> Running the test suite as part of the build process is pointless as it can
> easily take half an hour. There's only one make clean/rebuild we have to
> worry about unlike weston's multiple rebuild types.
>
> It's a bit apples to oranges because I opted for a single meson.build file
> instead of the current recursive automake, so some of the speedup is likely
> caused by that. Documentation build is currently missing, but that's just a
> doxygen run. If anyone wants to run the numbers on different machines please
> do so, I just ran it with JOBS=4 on my T440s, i7-4600U CPU @ 2.10GHz, 12GB
> RAM, make -j4. I re-ran with -j8 but the numbers were almost identical
> anyway.

Flat vs. multiple files makes no difference for Meson. Weston
distributes it into multiple files, but they all land in one
build.ninja file anyway.

> Aside from the faster build times, meson's language feels a lot cleaner than
> autotools. I'm generally opposed to non-recursive Makefiles because they get
> messy, I didn't mind it here. So I'd be quite ok with switching to meson
> (after some more testing of course).

Great. :) It'll probably be another week / few days before I get to
respin the Meson work, as I want to get atomic (+ lots of other stuff
on top) v2 out first. But it's really neat! Glad you liked it.

Cheers,
Daniel