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 _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
