Meson-ized Mesa Now Supports More Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Meson-ized Mesa Now Supports More Drivers

At the end of September initial Meson support landed in Mesa while hitting 17.3-devel Git now is support for more of the Mesa drivers under this new build system...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Meson-More-Drivers

[baka0815]

Does changing the build system to meson change anything for the end user?

[yoshi314]

if the end user is running gentoo - it does.

[Guest]

What are advantages of Meson build system, except build speed?

[starshipeleven]

if the end user is running gentoo - it does.

They have meson too, and compile flags are for compiler, not for build system. What's the problem?

[PyroDevil]

They have meson too, and compile flags are for compiler, not for build system. What's the problem?

I think (s)he meant in a more general sense. Build times might improve, the build logs might change, etc.

[paulpach]

They have meson too, and compile flags are for compiler, not for build system. What's the problem?

Whenever you install software in gentoo, it is compiled from scratch using whatever build system the application supports. If Mesa supports Meson, then installing mesa will be faster. That is it.

[Serafean]

They have meson too, and compile flags are for compiler, not for build system. What's the problem?

Build flags are for the compiler, yes. But even they have to float through the build system to the compiler.
What Gentoo has more are "use flags" which is a way to enable/disable specific features of the final package, and this heavily interacts with the build system.

For the end user though, it mostly is transparent... (haven't seen the UTF-8 bug in a while...)

[dcbaker]

What are advantages of Meson build system, except build speed?

Compared to what?
Compared to autotools: Its syntax is more like modern scripting languages (ruby, python, etc), so it's easier to understand. It's implementation language is python, not m4. Upstream actually welcomes contributions, it has native, first class windows and osx support. It uses ninja instead of make, ninja is much, much faster for incremental rebuilds than make is.

Also, there is no cmake in mesa right now. just autotools, scons, and android. We're hoping that meson will be able to replace autotools and scons eventually so we just have two.

[tg--]

What are advantages of Meson build system, except build speed?

Obviously, changing build system will not impact pure users in any direct way.
However, developers usually find two major improvements when switching from autotools and co. to something like meson:
- much improved incremental build times
- easier maintainance

Those two alone are plenty enough reasons to at least think about migrating, and in many cases justifying the cost.