Meson+Ninja Showing Speedy Build Results For Shotwell

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Meson+Ninja Showing Speedy Build Results For Shotwell

The Shotwell GNOME photo manager is among the components that added Meson build system support for the GNOME 3.26 cycle...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Meson-Shotwell-Times

[yoshi314]

This may not seem like much, but it someone has an automated buildbot or some CI environment, those seconds probably quickly add up.

[uid313]

GNOME Builder makes it easy to get stated with Meson.
Just create a new project and it will be built using Meson.

[Candy]

Ja genau! Das "Mösen" Build System

[sdack]

Why did they have to depend on Python for it and couldn't just implement it in C/C++? ...

[andreano]

Meson is just written in Python3, but could be reimplemented in any language.

[andreano]

He measured the wrong thing: Clean build time.

What matters is rebuild time. And correctness, obviously. Why would you otherwise use a buildsystem?

[GrayShade]

He measured the wrong thing: Clean build time.

What matters is rebuild time. And correctness, obviously. Why would you otherwise use a buildsystem?

I'm sure Meson is a fine build system, but if you have correctness issues, you can just do a full rebuild every time .

[andreano]

I mean, what counts is the time it takes to do a correct rebuild – if "correct rebuild" means "full rebuild", so be it.

if you have correctness issues, you can just do a full rebuild every time

I know, people do that. Often for paranoia because they don't trust their buildsystem. But I would say it's like driving your airplane on the highway because it's not airworthy – at that point you don't have an airplane anymore: The purpose of a buildsystem is to figure out what needs to be rebuilt and rebuild that – the moment it can't do that, you don't have a buildsystem anymore.

Not that I've had any correctness issues with Meson. I think it's superb. Just pointing out what I think matters in a buildsystem comparison.

[GrayShade]

I mean, what counts is the time it takes to do a correct rebuild – if "correct rebuild" means "full rebuild", so be it.



I know, people do that. Often for paranoia because they don't trust their buildsystem. But I would say it's like driving your airplane on the highway because it's not airworthy – at that point you don't have an airplane anymore: The purpose of a buildsystem is to figure out what needs to be rebuilt and rebuild that – the moment it can't do that, you don't have a buildsystem anymore.

Not that I've had any correctness issues with Meson. I think it's superb.

Yeah, I wasn't picking on Meson, especially as I've never used it. It was a tongue-in-cheek remark.

But I've argued for hours with people to fix their qmake and Makefile projects because they were buggy. And after a couple of weird issues fixed by full rebuilds, they learned to do a full rebuild and wait like 5 minutes after changing a line. They said they didn't have time to look at the build scripts...