[RFC PATCH 0/8] Meson build system

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 30 November 2016 at 10:28, Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Nov 2016 10:00:40 +0000 Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
>> Yeah, generally I agree. That was my point about GNOME/GStreamer also
>> being conservative with build systems: neither of us have jumped over
>> to any new and fancy build systems before, because the benefits just
>> didn't outweigh the disadvantages of doing so. And I think that makes
>> total sense, since switching does have a very large cost. For all that
>> autotools is a Kafkaesque nightmare, and no-one actually knows how M4
>> quoting works, it's well understood by end users who build, by
>> distributors and integrators who build, and by developers who work on
>> the code. That's a huge thing to be throwing away, and not to be done
>> lightly.
>>
>> Meson for me is the first system whose advantages actually outweigh
>> the disadvantage of losing that. But that being said, I would like the
>> two to sit in parallel for a couple of releases; I don't think it
>> would make much sense to remove autotools support before 1.16-1.17,
>> when we'll have a useful version of Meson in the released version of
>> Debian (stretch) and Ubuntu, soon before that also becomes the new
>> Ubuntu LTS version. That would give us as developers plenty of time to
>> get used to things, and downstream plenty of time to adjust and help
>> us discover problems with it.
>
> That's a nice plan - how's the CI for all this? :-)
> The very least to point out buggy master even if it can't yet test
> patches before they land.

Ha ha. That's step two. :)

Cheers,
Daniel