On 24/03/17 20:08, Kristian Høgsberg wrote:
On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 12:44 PM, Jose Fonseca <jfonseca@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 24/03/17 19:10, Kristian Høgsberg wrote:
On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 6:42 AM, Jose Fonseca <jfonseca@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 23/03/17 01:38, Rob Clark wrote:
On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Jonathan Gray <jsg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 01:10:14PM -0700, Dylan Baker 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. Emil almost always finds cases
were we've
done things *almost*, but not quite right.
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.
Next, my bigger concern is for distro and casual packagers and people
that maintain large build systems with lots of existing custom
configurations. Changing from autotools would basically require many
of these existing tools and systems to be rewritten and then deal
with
the debugging and fall out from that. The potential decreased build
time is a nice bonus, but frankly a lot of people/companies have
years
of investment in existing tools.
Sure, but we're also not the only ones investigating meson. Gnome is
using it
already, libepoxy is using it, gstreamer is using it. There are
patches
for
weston (written by Daniel Stone) and libinput (written by Peter
Hutterer), there
are some other projects in the graphics sphere that people are working
on. So
even if we as a community decide that meson isn't for us, it's not
going
away.
It is worth pointing out that it is currently required by no component
of an x.org stack. In the case of libepoxy it was added by a new
maintainer
on a new release and even then autoconf remains.
And as far as I can tell nothing in the entire OpenBSD ports tree
currently requires meson to build including gnome and gstreamer.
but I guess that is conflating two completely different topics..
addition of meson and removal of autotools. It is probably better
that we treat the topics separately. I don't see any way that the two
can happen at the same time.
The autotools build probably needs to remain for at least a couple
releases, and I certainly wouldn't mind if some of the other desktop
projects took the leap of dropping autotools first (at least then
various different "distro" consumers will have already dealt with how
to build meson packages)
None of that blocks addition of a meson build system (or what various
developers use day to day)
BR,
-R
I tend to disagree. While we can't avoid a transitory period, when we
embark on another build system (Meson or something else) I think we
should
aim at 1) ensure such tool can indeed _completely_ replace at least _one_
existing build system, 2) and aim at migration quickly.
Otherwise we'll just end up with yet another build system, yet another
way
builds can fail, with some developers stuck on old build systems because
it
works, or because the new build system quite doesn't work.
And this is from (painful) experience.
I agree, adding a meson build system should aim to phase out one of
the other build systems within one or two release cycles. But (and
maybe that was Robs point) that doesn't have be autotools. What if we
phase out scons? It doesn't seem like anybody is really attached to it
and if meson is as good as scons on windows, then if nothing else
happens we end up with the same number of build systems. What's more
likely to happen is that a lot of Linux developers (and CI systems)
will also start using meson, which means that life gets easier for
vmware wrt maintaining the build system, and easier for all developers
who have spent to much of their life waiting for autogen.sh. Then
decommissioning autotools can be a separate topic as Rob suggests,
something we'll do when the world is ready.
There's zero overlap between SCons build users and Meson experience, so I
don't see how that would work. Who would lead the charge?
It sounds like Dylan and the Intel team are interested in doing the
meson work. If that's the case, then perhaps you (or other SCons
users) would be willing to evaluate the result and see if it meets
your requirements for a SCons replacement?
Kristian
Evaluating is one thing. Actually migrating is another.
Brian already said he'd take a look and evaluate. And I'll help in what
I can. I agree we should all evaluate early.
But I don't think that the proposal of first migrate scons to meson,
then in a second separate step migrate autotools to meson, is viable.
Like I said: there's no knowledge overlap. The two group of people --
the Meson and Windows experts -- will be chasing each other tails. And
all that while, the build will continue to be broken or diverge because
master dev will go on.
Jose
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