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

[pal666]

compare that to CMake or Autotools which use their own scripting languages - those core tools could e re-implemented with any language without any of the custom modules or extensions being affected.

own scripting languages are bad. they suck and you have to learn new language and write tool support for it. and in case of standard scripting language core tools can be reimplemented in any language too, just your build description will be written in one language and your core tool in another, different languages can interact

I am also not sure if Meson will ever support the coming C++ Modules correctly, thats a big question for CMake aswell but Mesons response seems that the standard needs to bow to their needs

i think he just said that this can change, so they are waiting for full release
and it will change, current idea is that compiler will call back into build system when it needs modules, so build system will know when it needs to build them

[pal666]

C/C++ is perhaps one of the worst languages for writing software,

those are two different languages. and one of them is perhaps one of the best languages for writing software

if Python could support backwards compatibility it would be far, far better than C or C++.

if grandmother had balls it would be grandfather. but in our case python would still be slow dynamically typed toy language

I however prefer Perl and its philosophies.

yep, write-only awk killer is best for maintainability

[pal666]

It's too bad that CMake didn't get better enough over the years to preempt meson. I really prefer the way CMake separates configuration and build systems from eachother. Makes supporting Visual Studio (without the trouble of installing it and/or maintaining a second build system) really easy.

i'm not sure what you are talking about, meson is exactly like cmake with different syntax(and stricter semantic). and it supports visual studio

[dungeon]

Good. I'm waiting for Debian builds to start using Meson for Mesa pacakges.

They already started a week ago, although in experimental for now.

mesa (18.3.0~rc4-1) experimental; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release candidate.
  * control: Bump libdrm-dev dependency to 2.4.95.
  * libgl1-mesa-dri.install: Updated, etc/drirc is now
    usr/share/drirc.d/00-mesa-defaults.conf.
  * libegl-mesa0.symbols: Updated.
  * Build with gcc8 again.
  * control, rules: [B]Build with meson[/B].

 -- Timo Aaltonen <[email protected]>  Thu, 29 Nov 2018 15:35:41 +0200

Well, If some big cockroaches for all release architectures does not happen, it will go like that Let alone unofficial ones, these like to complain too

[shmerl]

why though? as a user you will not see a difference at all

I often build Mesa from source, and use Debian configure scripts as a convenient guide how to do it
So a good example of using Meson would be useful.

[shmerl]

They already started a week ago, although in experimental for now.

mesa (18.3.0~rc4-1) experimental; urgency=medium

* New upstream release candidate.
* control: Bump libdrm-dev dependency to 2.4.95.
* libgl1-mesa-dri.install: Updated, etc/drirc is now
usr/share/drirc.d/00-mesa-defaults.conf.
* libegl-mesa0.symbols: Updated.
* Build with gcc8 again.
* control, rules: [B]Build with meson[/B].

-- Timo Aaltonen <[email protected]> Thu, 29 Nov 2018 15:35:41 +0200

Well, If some big cockroaches for all release architectures does not happen, it will go like that Let alone unofficial ones, these like to complain too

Good to know, thanks! I'll take a look.

[shmerl]

They already started a week ago, although in experimental for now.

Hm. I don't see any invocation of "meson configure" here, though it's clearly calling meson somewhere inside. I'd need to figure out what's going on.

UPDATE:

Ah, found it. It looks like:

LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 meson .. --wrap-mode=nodownload --buildtype=plain ...

[cl333r]

cargo is a toy build system for toy language. and i have to say you never heard of all c/c++ build systems

I use CMake for years with C++ and Qt5, you clearly have no clue what you're talking about.

[shmerl]

cargo is a toy build system for toy language. and i have to say you never heard of all c/c++ build systems

C++ has no notion of modules (at least yet, there is are some ideas to fix that in the future C++). All those includes and include guards are a clunky ancient way to do what in modern languages is done through modules and import. cargo is managing modules for Rust. C++ has nothing similar, because modules aren't even part of the language design. Build systems for it are tediously working around this mess today, to make it look like you do have them.

See https://medium.com/@wrongway4you/bri...es-f58287a6c64

[rene]

I often build Mesa from source, and use Debian configure scripts as a convenient guide how to do it
So a good example of using Meson would be useful.

that one needs to read other distributions scripts / config and examples does not even make this meson stuff to be so easy, natural, and most awesome to use, … :-/