Libinput 1.9 Released With Input Improvements, Requires Meson

[sdack]

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.

Nobody wants to maintain two build systems. It's however not the point. Nobody has ever said redundancy increases performance, but it can be good to have it anyway.

I like Meson, because its fast and new, but I cannot say that I like to build a project on something that's still largely under development, where I don't know when it's going to be stable or just if the documentation I read today is still the same tomorrow.

[inigomartinez]

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.

There's a new patch on its way which fixes the README file by replacing the autotools' steps for their meson's equivalents.

[andreano]

Eh, you do know that you don't have to use Ninja, right? If you want to use a different backend, you can.

Unless you're talking about the VS or Xcode backends, you're supposed to use Ninja. There is no Make backend like in CMake. The premise for that decision is Ninja's ubiquitous availability:

Meson FAQ:

The only reason why one would use Make instead of Ninja is working on a platform that does not have a Ninja port. Even in this case it is an order of magnitude less work to port Ninja than it is to write a Make backend for Meson.

Ninja still won't install on some platforms without patches

Seriously? Which platforms?

Is that a deficiency of Ninja or those platforms? If Ninja is less portable than Make in 2017, well, I actually hope an avalanche of Meson porting will fix that by giving the right people the right incentives.

[sdack]

Seriously? Which platforms?

Is that a deficiency of Ninja or those platforms? If Ninja is less portable than Make in 2017, well, I actually hope an avalanche of Meson porting will fix that by giving the right people the right incentives.

Well, good questions, but a little too late to ask them now. Now it's pointless, when everyone is forced to use it. So much about having freedom with open source.