[RFC PATCH 0/8] Meson build system

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Wednesday 2016-11-30 09:54, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
>I'm looking forward to hearing your war stories on trying to beat sense
>into autotools. I would never dare even approach it. Maybe it's FUD you
>can show to be false, but I kind of doubt it.
>
>One huge convenience of Meson is (the documentation claims) that you
>only need the one file 'meson.py' to use it, which makes the dependency
>to meson a very easy one.

I think they got it the wrong way around:
configure only needs sh+sed, while meson needs python.

The slowness of configure comes from mostly from the use of sh, and
then specifically bash, and also because you have to create new
processes for every other trivial thing like grepping in output.

That is where modern build systems could improve on. But instead they
throw *everything* overboard, even though Makefile.am is reusable:
minus custom rules, it is just a set of key-value pairs and
lazy-evaluated variables.