X.Org Server Bids Farewell To Autotools

[Weasel]

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?

There's obviously some conspiracy going on.

You can't take a build system depending on Python as anything more than a toy. That's a fact.

[Orphis]

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

All I know is Cobol. I'm sure all those Javascript kids will soon realize it's just a fad. /s

While "make" does work (sometimes), it has a lot of different issues:
- different not so compatible implementations: GNU make and BSD make aren't the same.
- obscure syntax and rules: no one teaches it well anymore.
- designed for 40 years old machines. We can do better now (see Ninja) in less time.
- broken or full of hacks on Windows. Whether you like it or not, it's a major platform and layers like Cygwin are too cumbersome and slow.

Lots of tools now don't bother supporting Make anymore and go straight for Ninja support, and they don't have any issue with adoption.

[Orphis]

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

And you typed it wrong. Which is understandable because it's unnecessarily complex. That's why we need better tools that have a better interface and better defaults.
While multicore machines were not the norm back when "make" was created, there's no excuse for a tool now to require a parallelisation flag. It should be the default, and under specific circumstances only should you want to disable it.

The only reason it's usually not the default for Makefiles is that they have broken build dependencies and won't properly build in parallel. That says a lot about the quality of scripts in the ecosystem.

[Morty]

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

Dang it, I thought x.org still used imake.

[bug77]

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?

I bet those two kind of overlap in the OP's mind.

[jabl]

Dang it, I thought x.org still used imake.

I was wondering the same, and per wikipedia it seems they switched from imake to autotools around 2005.

[CommunityMember]

While "make" does work (sometimes), it has a lot of different issues:

Almost every build system for any non-trivial project has issues.

There is no one correct choice for many open source projects (it will often depend on the developers knowledge of the various tools, or the organizational standards), but there are many people who would suggest autotools' time has past for new projects (large existing projects need a lot of reason to expend the effort to change).

[perpetually high]

And you typed it wrong. Which is understandable because it's unnecessarily complex

Hahaha, I typed it in the terminal correctly before posting, $(nproc) and then butchered it in the post. Great catch and call out.

[BwackNinja]

The only thing I don't like about meson is that it's written in python, because that introduces another dependency when building a minimal system from scratch. Of all the things I could dislike about a build system, that's rather minor.

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.

I'm pretty sure that anyone who likes Arch for more than bragging on the internet loves the package manager and build system. XBPS from Void Linux and APK from Alpine Linux (which is actually a bit better) are both inspired by Pacman. I think Arch Linux is the only distro where you are actively encouraged to make your own packages and has an easy enough build system where that doesn't sound like a lie. A meta-build-system is one of the most important pieces when building a system from scratch.

[sdack]

There's obviously some conspiracy going on.

You can't take a build system depending on Python as anything more than a toy. That's a fact.

A bit harsh, but I get your point.

However, Python is easy enough to install. The biggest problem I have seen so far is when build tools require the presence of an Internet connection in order to install packages from a random server during a build. Those are taking it too far in my opinion. For GNOME and other graphics-related software, which require a bit more than a C compiler and the base library, is it acceptable to rely on Python. Autotools made the most sense when we had many competing UNIXes with all sorts of shell flavours. Those days are over.

By the way, the article states that Meson was the dominant build system. I believe what he means is that it is the dominant build system for GNOME. I have so far always been under the impression that CMake was the unofficial successor of the autotools. At least I come across CMake far more often than Meson.