Hello, Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> writes:
>> The larger reason is that meson as build system is a lot more pleasant >> to deal with, and many projects, particularly those affiliated with >> Gnome are switching to it. Gstreamer is perhaps the most well known. > > Well, I have seen several attempts at providing a good build system: > SCons, CMake, quagmire, ninja, ... and none of them so far was attractive > to the entire GNU community. (Although I do concede that ninja looks > promising, because it follows the philosophy of "do one thing and do it > right".) > > Gettext's build system is the GNU build system, because we want every > GNU maintainer to be able to get familiar with Gettext's code when necessary. I agree with this, but we don't need to switch over to the new build system completely. Several projects keep the GNU build system along with the meson build system: https://github.com/GStreamer/gstreamer https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon Of course, it could be a burden if one had to maintain two build systems and some might drop either of them in the future. Personally I am interested in how it could help reduce the build time. If anyone experiments it and provides the benchmark result, that would be nice. >> The immediate reason is that getting to the point where gettext can be >> built takes an unusually long time: several minutes, and for no good >> reason that I can see, just lots of trivial tests like whether >> definitions are macros etc. > > The main reason that it takes a long time is that it is composed of > several directories, each doing its own configuration. Maybe you can > speed it up by passing a --cache option that points to an (initially > empty) file? I remember someone proposed to switch to non-recursive make and eliminate AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS calls for performance reasons. I suggested the same and he told that it didn't help much. Regards, -- Daiki Ueno
