Mesa Developers Move Closer To Dropping Autotools Build System In Favor Of Meson

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Developers Move Closer To Dropping Autotools Build System In Favor Of Meson

Mesa developers have been discussing on and off in recent months about dropping their Autotools build system support considering there is also the SCons build support, Android build system support, and most notably is the increasingly mature Meson build system coverage...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Closer-To-Kill-Autotools

[rene]

unpopular opinion: meson sucks, this wild west of build systems really get's annoying, more difficult than ever to keep things build, especially cross compiled and such. really annoying for barely anything. slightly related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNipdcUh7ZE

[az200]

unpopular opinion: meson sucks, this wild west of build systems really get's annoying, more difficult than ever to keep things build, especially cross compiled and such. really annoying for barely anything. slightly related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNipdcUh7ZE

meson seems to get more things right than any other build system.

[FireBurn]

unpopular opinion: meson sucks, this wild west of build systems really get's annoying, more difficult than ever to keep things build, especially cross compiled and such. really annoying for barely anything. slightly related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNipdcUh7ZE

Projects are moving to it, because it's easier and quicker than autotools. If you do have a real issue or bug with meson, rather than just hearsay purely because it's not what you're used to - raise a bug

[Candy]

Projects are moving to it, because it's easier and quicker than autotools [...]

What took them so long to get the port done ? It's not as if we hear about Mesa Meson Port for the first time here. Articles are spread over months now.

[rene]

Projects are moving to it, because it's easier and quicker than autotools. If you do have a real issue or bug with meson, rather than just hearsay purely because it's not what you're used to - raise a bug

Try cross compiling a package, also it is so amazing, that libinput additionally needs ninja or so, ..! and then you have already to deal wit two annoying build "tools" – plus each build system has other --enable-some-feature option and such. The libinput build is so hilarious now, that I will probably make a dedicated video documenting this mess sometime soon. No wonder that desktop Linux is not progressing, if half of the time is spend re-implementing the build system of each package that already worked for for a decade or more.

[Redfoxmoon]

Contributing performance patches to autotools is the right way to go, but there's no fame and fortune in that, there lets make 1^infinity more shitty build systems, not to mention bloated requirements

[zeehio]

What took them so long to get the port done ? It's not as if we hear about Mesa Meson Port for the first time here. Articles are spread over months now.

One of the reasons may be that they had to wait for most linux distributions to adopt the meson build system and adapt their packaging. Now that the mesa meson build is widespread enough at least across the most popular linux distributions they can start to think about removing autotools.

Related: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...er/210956.html

[SpyroRyder]

Try cross compiling a package, also it is so amazing, that libinput additionally needs ninja or so, ..! and then you have already to deal wit two annoying build "tools" – plus each build system has other --enable-some-feature option and such. The libinput build is so hilarious now, that I will probably make a dedicated video documenting this mess sometime soon. No wonder that desktop Linux is not progressing, if half of the time is spend re-implementing the build system of each package that already worked for for a decade or more.

Meson builds via Ninja in the same way Autotools builds via Make so yes its an extra tool but so interconnected that its not worth worrying about. Also as an aside, Meson is the first good effort to replace Autotools in a lot of projects. Some projects, like Mesa, have had multiple build systems for different platforms but havent until now tried to remove autotools despite all of its problems.

[miabrahams]

Contributing performance patches to autotools is the right way to go, but there's no fame and fortune in that, there lets make 1^infinity more shitty build systems, not to mention bloated requirements

It's not just about performance. It's simple to use, easy to read and write. Even if Autotools supported Ninja and Meson didn't, I would choose Meson.