Libinput 1.9 Released With Input Improvements, Requires Meson

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Libinput 1.9 Released With Input Improvements, Requires Meson

Peter Hutterer has today released libinput 1.9.0 as the latest version of this library used by both Wayland and X11 systems for unified input handling...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libinput-1.9-Released

[sdack]

Libinput, gtk+3.92, dconf, ... all dropped autotools support the moment they had converted to meson. The dconf project dropped it so quickly its documentation still only refers to autotools for installation. They're being hypocrites when they say autotools was a mess and are now creating a mess of their own. Ninja still won't install on some platforms without patches and meson isn't even stable yet.

[bison]

Libinput, gtk+3.92, dconf, ... all dropped autotools support the moment they had converted to meson. The dconf project dropped it so quickly its documentation still only refers to autotools for installation. They're being hypocrites when they say autotools was a mess and are now creating a mess of their own. Ninja still won't install on some platforms without patches and meson isn't even stable yet.

I tried to build Weston from source a few days ago, and this is where I got stuck. I was really surprised that libinput required 983 MB of packages from the repositories on LM 18.1 to build. It's even pulling in stuff from webkit.

I've built a lot of apps from source on this system, so the total would probably be even higher on a fresh install. To me, this is kind of off-putting -- I expected libput to be a rather small library that just did its thing and nothing else.

[johanb]

I tried to build Weston from source a few days ago, and this is where I got stuck. I was really surprised that libinput required 983 MB of packages from the repositories on LM 18.1 to
build. It's even pulling in stuff from webkit.

I've built a lot of apps from source on this system, so the total would probably be even higher on a fresh install. To me, this is kind of off-putting -- I expected libput to be a rather small library that just did its thing and nothing else.

I'm not sure what LM18.1 is doing with their build dependencies, but for me on debian it was a mere 1.4MB (dh-autoreconf libevdev-dev libmtdev-dev libudev-dev)

Meson improves upon a lot of things but it also still has a fair share of issues, this is not one of them though.

[Vistaus]

Libinput, gtk+3.92, dconf, ... all dropped autotools support the moment they had converted to meson. The dconf project dropped it so quickly its documentation still only refers to autotools for installation. They're being hypocrites when they say autotools was a mess and are now creating a mess of their own. Ninja still won't install on some platforms without patches and meson isn't even stable yet.

Eh, you do know that you don't have to use Ninja, right? If you want to use a different backend, you can. That's the nice thing about Meson: you're not stuck with one compiler, you can use any backend written for it.

[sdack]

Eh, you do know that you don't have to use Ninja, right? If you want to use a different backend, you can. That's the nice thing about Meson: you're not stuck with one compiler, you can use any backend written for it.

On the contrary, I do want to use it, but it would have been smart to keep the support for autotools alive until Meson reaches stability. Now they've made themselves fully dependent on it without an alternative, which is exactly where they were before with autotools.

[bison]

I'm not sure what LM18.1 is doing with their build dependencies, but for me on debian it was a mere 1.4MB (dh-autoreconf libevdev-dev libmtdev-dev libudev-dev)

That sounds a lot more reasonable. I'm going to try again on a fresh install of Ubuntu and see what happens. I would expect Ubuntu and LM to have similar build dependencies, but maybe not.

[andreano]

libinput required 983 MB of packages from the repositories on LM 18.1 to build. It's even pulling in stuff from webkit.

Sometimes, distro packagers fuck up (I fondly remember Fedora 22 pulling in Xorg as a dependency of Nginx on a headless server). Or you were a bit behind on package updates.

[andreano]

The dconf project dropped it so quickly its documentation still only refers to autotools for installation.

You're right, but referring to `./configure && make` is not necessarily an error: Some projects wrap Meson and Ninja in a configure script and a makefile (yes, depending on Make just to invoke Ninja, LOL) just to make that old idiom still work. I checked dconf, and you're right, because they have neither updated the documentation or made those legacy wrappers.

[starshipeleven]

Now they've made themselves fully dependent on it without an alternative, which is exactly where they were before with autotools.

I'm not sure why they would even want to have to maintain 2 build systems.

Once they migrated to the newer and possibly better one it makes no sense to keep the older build system too.