Re: [Mesa-dev] [RFC libdrm 0/2] Replace the build system with meson

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On 22 March 2017 at 20:10, Dylan Baker <dylan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 12:40 PM, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I guess I'm a little late to the party here, but I haven't had time to
>> really let all of this sink in and actually look at meson.  It doesn't
>> seem so bad with a quick look and I think I could probably sort it out
>> when the time came, but there would still be a bit of a learning
>> curve.  While that may not be a big deal at the micro level, I have
>> concerns at the macro level.
>>
>> First, I'm concerned it may discourage casual developers and
>> packagers.  autotools isn't great, but most people are familiar enough
>> with it that they can get by.  Most people have enough knowledge of
>> autotools that they can pretty easily diagnose a configuration based
>> failure. There are a lot of resources for autotools.  I'm not sure
>> that would be the case for meson.  Do we as a community feel we have
>> enough meson experience to get people over the hump?  Anything that
>> makes it harder for someone to try a new build or do a bisect is a big
>> problem in my opinion.
>
> One of the things that's prompted this on our side (I've talked this over with
> other people at Intel before starting), was that clearly we *don't* know
> autotools well enough to get it right.
You do know that I'm always happy to answer questions and help people
;-) Just last night I gave a 2 minute crash course to Lyude why things
behave strange and how to get the desired workflow.

> Emil almost always finds cases were we've
> done things *almost*, but not quite right.
>
Care I say it - I'm a pessimist forged by unfortunate circumstances.
Hence I always see things that are wrong - Mesa build system is no
exception.
I'm fairly confident that if/when we move to Meson we (I?) will be
fixing bugs for at least two releases.

The more frustrating part is that atm autotools build is "bug-free"
and with meson will have to go through the same route again :-\

> For my part, it took me about 3 or 4 days of reading through the docs and
> writing the libdrm port to get it right, and a lot of that is just the
> boilerplate of having ~8 drivers that all need basically the same logic.
>
Slightly off-topic - 3 days to write the build script for ~10 [nearly]
identical libraries which do not do anything fancy, seems a lot.
Which was the most time consuming part ?

I'm concerned that we would have to enforce the same time penalty onto
dozens of developers unfamiliar with meson.

Thanks
Emil
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