Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Treeve Jelbert <treeve AT scarlet.be>]

Major projects such as gnome,xorg and mesa are switching to meson.
This gives them cleaner build scripts, much faster builds and support 
for multiple operating systems from one set of scripts.
One major gain when building is that changes to build scripts do not 
require running autoreconf which can be  very tedious.

Some smaller parts of those projects have already abandoned autotools.
I see that gtk4 has also done so.

As far as SMGL is concerned, this means lots of changes to dependency 
and build flags.

For smaller spells  this is trivial.
I have been experimenting with meson builds for xserver and mesa.

What I see so far is the old spells have some very complex 
dependencies, many of which are only needed for very obscure features or 
hardware.
This can result in dependencies which are irrelevant in many cases.


At present xserver(1.20) can build multiple servers 
(Xorg,XWayland,XNest,Xvfb,Xephyr,DMX, either singly or in various 
combinations.
Does anyone actually use anything other than Xorg or XWayland?
I have not yet tried running this, but may do so soon.


Mesa(18.x) is much more complex. It can build some vulkan 
drivers(amd,intel) and recent radeonsi,nouveau and intel drivers. It 
also supports Broadcom vc4/vc5, but these are not usually found on x86 
platforms. This code is evolving rapidly.

I currently get link errors in the final step when using llvm. I asked 
upstream but no solution yet.

For the moment these spells are in a local repo and reference local git 
repos for xserver and mesa sources. They do not use tarballs.

When there are tarballs available for these. I will submit alternative 
spells for xserver and mesa which use meson.


Regards, Treeve