Mesa 19.0 Deprecates GNU Autotools Build System In Favor Of Meson

Last month was a proposed patch that would have killed the Autotools build system within Mesa. Developers have decided for the upcoming Mesa 19.0 release not to eliminate this GNU Autotools support but rather to mark it as deprecated and require an extra flag in order to make use of it.

Hitting Mesa Git master today was the patch deprecating Autotools support within Mesa in favor of the Meson build system. It hasn't been determined when the Autotools scripts will be removed themselves, but for now if wanting to enable the support you need to pass --enable-autotools to acknowledge the fact that it's been deprecated.

Most Mesa developers have come out in favor of the deprecation except for Nouveau developer Ilia Mirkin who "NAKed" the patch. Among the benefits of moving to the Meson build system for Mesa is better cross-platform compatibility, faster build times paired with Ninja, and an easier to maintain build system.

This deprecation will be introduced with Mesa 19.0 that will see its feature freeze later this month and should be officially released before the end of February.