Mesa Eyeing The Removal Of Autotools Build Support In Favor Of Meson

For those currently relying upon Autotools for building Mesa3D, the days are numbered and soon will likely need to shift over to their modern Meson build system support.

For the past year now, Mesa developers have been working on bringing up their Meson build system support for its faster build speeds with Ninja, better cross-platform compatibility, and other benefits. Meson has co-existed with the Autotools (and SCons and Android build systems) support over the past year of Mesa releases, but moving forward they are likely very soon to drop the Autotools support.

Dylan Baker who has been working on much of the Mesa-Meson bring-up has started a discussion about removing the Autotools scripts. Most developers seem to be in agreement on soon eliminating this build system, but some first are wanting to ensure some corner-cases are addressed and all other issues ironed out first with Meson.

Dylan proposes merging it as soon as prior to the Mesa 18.3 release while others have expressed a preference for after the 18.3 release. Long story short, probably by the end of the year the Autotools support for Mesa will be dropped.