meson build-system

meson build-system

[Karel Zak]

 Hi all,

A year ago Zbigniew (CC:) implemented meson build-system as a second
build system for util-linux. Today I finally updated it and pushed to
the topic/meson branch on github. You can try it:

   git checkout -f topic/meson
   meson build
   ninja -C build
   ls build/

No panic, we are going to keep autotools as our primary build-system
for the next years :-)

The goal is to try to provide an alternative, make it more stable,
and maybe in future use it. The current util-linux meson configuration is 
probably not mature enough to be used as a build-system for end-users and
downstream distributions, but it seems as a nice alternative for
developers, it's faster and it produces real binaries rather than
libtool scripts.

  $ git clean -xdf
  $ time ( meson build;  ninja -C build )
  real	0m9.093s
  user	0m12.797s
  sys   0m5.232s

  $ git clean -xdf
  $ time ( ./autogen.sh; ./configure; make -j )
  real	0m41.563s
  user	1m52.681s
  sys	0m30.346s

All the meson configuration is completely independent on autotools or
another code in the package. I'll probably merge it to the master
branch ASAP to make it easy to use for contributors.

Comments & objections?

  Karel

-- 
 Karel Zak  <kzak@redhat.com>
 http://karelzak.blogspot.com

Re: meson build-system

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 07:00:30PM +0100, Karel Zak wrote:
> 
>  Hi all,
> 
> A year ago Zbigniew (CC:) implemented meson build-system as a second
> build system for util-linux. Today I finally updated it and pushed to
> the topic/meson branch on github. You can try it:
> 
>    git checkout -f topic/meson
>    meson build
>    ninja -C build
>    ls build/
> 
> No panic, we are going to keep autotools as our primary build-system
> for the next years :-)

Don't underestimate the dark side, Karel!
9s vs 41s (and an even bigger ratio on partial builds) is going to be
a strong pull.

> The goal is to try to provide an alternative, make it more stable,
> and maybe in future use it. The current util-linux meson configuration is 
> probably not mature enough to be used as a build-system for end-users and
> downstream distributions, but it seems as a nice alternative for
> developers, it's faster and it produces real binaries rather than
> libtool scripts.

Eh, I'd say that at this point meson (despite occasional small tweaks
required) is more stable than autotools. Right now autotools is stable
mostly because it doesn't change. With the upcoming update to
autoconf-2.71 that era is coming to an end.

>   $ git clean -xdf
>   $ time ( meson build;  ninja -C build )
>   real	0m9.093s
>   user	0m12.797s
>   sys   0m5.232s
> 
>   $ git clean -xdf
>   $ time ( ./autogen.sh; ./configure; make -j )
>   real	0m41.563s
>   user	1m52.681s
>   sys	0m30.346s
> 
> All the meson configuration is completely independent on autotools or
> another code in the package. I'll probably merge it to the master
> branch ASAP to make it easy to use for contributors.
> 
> Comments & objections?

Zbyszek

Re: meson build-system

[Karel Zak]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 08:19:25PM +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> > The goal is to try to provide an alternative, make it more stable,
> > and maybe in future use it. The current util-linux meson configuration is 
> > probably not mature enough to be used as a build-system for end-users and
> > downstream distributions, but it seems as a nice alternative for
> > developers, it's faster and it produces real binaries rather than
> > libtool scripts.
> 
> Eh, I'd say that at this point meson (despite occasional small tweaks
> required) is more stable than autotools.

I have talked about "current util-linux meson configuration", not
about meson itself. We need to test our stuff better, make sure all
the configuration options works as expected, etc.

    Karel

-- 
 Karel Zak  <kzak@redhat.com>
 http://karelzak.blogspot.com