X.Org Server Bids Farewell To Autotools

[phoronix]

Phoronix: X.Org Server Bids Farewell To Autotools

With X.Org Server 21.1 having finally shipped this week, the X.Org Server Autotools build system support has been killed off...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...-Bye-Autotools

[Redfoxmoon]

Can't wait for the next FAD build system to come along and then everyone and their dog will jump again.

[RahulSundaram]

Can't wait for the next FAD build system to come along and then everyone and their dog will jump again.

What do you genuinely think is more likely? That Meson presents enough of an advantage that all these free software developers who have worked on decades on major projects are switching over or that it is just a FAD?

[perpetually high]

X.Org Server 21.1 is the last series to have Autotools support -- that is if/when there is ultimately a next major X.Org Server release given it took three years for v21.1 before someone stepped up to manage the release and most Linux distributions transitioning to Wayland-based sessions.

I realized in life, all it takes is one person. Took Linus to start his hobby project for us to congregate here.

Anyways, thank you again, Povilas Kanapickas. We needed someone to step up. I've seen many others step up also. I thank them also.

Plus Meson has better cross-platform support, much more modern and easier to maintain, and goes along with the overall trend of open-source projects transitioning over to Meson as the dominant build system of recent years.

While I love "./configure && make -j($nproc) && sudo make install" I do get we probably needed a new build system.

[DarkCloud]

All build tools that I know of on Linux use Make, which is 40 years old if not more. I think Meson breaks away from Make so maybe it's new approach is more then a fad

[leipero]

Not sure what's wrong with Autotools in comparison to Meson, yes, automake and autoconfigure are overcomplicated for no actual reason and make no sense at first at all, but I don't know if Meson solves that problem, if it does, it kinda makes sense to move to it. I mean seriously, learning Autotools is pain in the b... hope Meson isn't like that (hope I will never need to learn it anyway)

[stikonas]

All build tools that I know of on Linux use Make, which is 40 years old if not more. I think Meson breaks away from Make so maybe it's new approach is more then a fad

Some build tools can use other backends. E.g. CMake can use ninja which is more lightweight compared to make (I think it lacks some string manipulation features of make).

[skeevy420]

While I love "./configure && make -j($nproc) && sudo make install" I do get we probably needed a new build system.

Yeah. It always sucks when "sudo make uninstall" doesn't return that critical system library it replaced.

Out of curiosity: How many Arch users use Arch because we can wrap pretty much any build system inside a PKGBUILD which, IMHO, makes it easy to do custom stuff with dependency resolution? Feel free to replace Arch/PKGBUILD with Gentoo/Emerge or any other distribution and package system that caters building from source.

[oleid]

All build tools that I know of on Linux use Make, which is 40 years old if not more. I think Meson breaks away from Make so maybe it's new approach is more then a fad

Have a look at bazel. It doesn't have ninja or make as a backend, it just builds itself.

[liskin]

Anyways, thank you again, Povilas Kanapickas. We needed someone to step up. I've seen many others step up also. I thank them also.

There's an alternative to someone stepping up: funding. Povilas mentioned on Hacker News that $4k/m would need to be raised for Xorg to be maintained into the future: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29019612