Wayland Adds Meson Build System Support

[zxy_thf]

Sure, if you're using a desktop PC, but you might also want to use a headless CI/CD build server.

False claim, Alpine is smaller than most distros, even with python.
In other words, you're using a bloating distro and blame python.

[Britoid]

Meson is an abomination since it's written in Python. Ninja is fine.

CMake is fine too, because it is statically compiled, so you can drop it on any system and have it work.

Meson doesn't even work for 5 year old distros or very long term release distros since it relies on new Python features. It's the most pathetic build system in existence.

That sounds like a distro problem rather than a Meson problem.

[cen1]

Help me understand something. When people complain Wayland doesn't support this and that, it gets pointed out that Wayland is just a protocol and it's the concrete implementation that's the problem. If Wayland is just a protocol, why does it need meson?

Well, I assume because even protocol spec needs to build the interfaces, headers, documentation etc..

[BwackNinja]

As an alternative to ninja, there's also samurai ( https://github.com/michaelforney/samurai ) which is officially supported by meson ( https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/3405 ). It's written in C and has a small Makefile for building it.

[bug77]

Help me understand something. When people complain Wayland doesn't support this and that, it gets pointed out that Wayland is just a protocol and it's the concrete implementation that's the problem. If Wayland is just a protocol, why does it need meson?

[Weasel]

Meson is an abomination since it's written in Python. Ninja is fine.

CMake is fine too, because it is statically compiled, so you can drop it on any system and have it work.

Meson doesn't even work for 5 year old distros or very long term release distros since it relies on new Python features. It's the most pathetic build system in existence.

[cen1]

CMake is always the answer.

[Redfoxmoon]

inb4 this user suggests the custom set of bash scripts they have developed

Thats equally nasty, either use makefiles or autotools properly :^)

[discordian]

To be fair, Ninja depends on Python which provides a non-trivial amount of runtime code. For example, on Arch Linux Python3 package is 152 MB in size.

ninja does not depend on python, its only needed for bootstrapping the build (ie. ninja's own buildsystem contain python scripts).

meson is another mess however, since its not anywhere complete and not extensible you end up with various shell (often with bashisms) and python scripts in a package, and pretty much anything I tried to crossbuild on embedded needs special care to compile.
if you for ex. use buildroot, it will never use the system installed meson but build a patched one from source (and build python3 aswell). if just one package depends on meson, you will easily double the buildtime of your root filesystem.
Yeah, it might be a good replacements for autotools but that's a pretty low bar.

Edit: and it seems in the master branch of ninja, there is already CMake support, so no need for python to build ninja in the future

[Britoid]

I can't think of any major server distro that doesn't ship with Python either.