Meson-ized Mesa Now Supports More Drivers

[andreano]

Any reason Mesa was still clinging to autotools up until now?

Why has CMake failed to replace autotools (in the free software domain) for 17 years now?

I'm sure Meson beats CMake in a lot of minor ways, but what's the killer feature that kept autotools alive? It's called the Xorg of buildsystems for a reason.

[miabrahams]

Why has CMake failed to replace autotools (in the free software domain) for 17 years now?

CMake is still a weird domain specific language and learning to use it still proves a high hurdle, just like autotools.

Meson is just Python, so it offers a huge usability improvement.

[Alliancemd]

CMake is still a weird domain specific language and learning to use it still proves a high hurdle, just like autotools.

Meson is just Python, so it offers a huge usability improvement.

CMake is pretty simple if you just start using it.
In general it is easier and more appropriate then Meson for big projects but it is pretty hard to write correctly for library developers.
Most library developers write wrong CMake files. If the library developer wrote the CMake correctly(Find[Package].cmake/[Package]Config.cmake) then all you need to import the correct compiler flags, include paths and linker search paths, is:
target_link_libraries(<the binary> [Namespace::]<Package>) # Yep, one-liner for all the correct flags and settings

As for people asking how does this affect end-users(in a somewhat dissatisfied tone, which is annoying):
- Developers will be more productive(faster builds, easier to maintain, etc...), so this ends-up making the software better

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.

You realize that over 70% of the open-source projects use CMake(according to GitHub)?
Ok, upstream doesn't use CMake but they should at least offer Find[Package].cmake/[Package]Config.cmake - this should be considered a bug...

[schwarzman]

Meson is just Python, so it offers a huge usability improvement.

Just wanted to point out that one important feature of meson is that its configuration language is NOT a real language but "just" a DSL which happens to resemble Python. So it is possible to rewrite meson in any language without impacting projects which just use meson.