On Mon, Apr 01, 2024 at 11:17:21AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Sat, Mar 30, 2024 at 08:44:36AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: >... > > Yes, perhaps it's time to switch to a different build system, although one > > of the reasons I've personally been putting this off is that I do a lot of > > feature probing for library APIs that have changed over time, and I'm not > > sure how one does that in the non-Autoconf build systems. Meson's Porting > > from Autotools [1] page, for example, doesn't seem to address this use > > case at all. > > The other problem is that many of the other build systems are much > slower than autoconf/makefile. (Note: I don't use libtool, because > it's so d*mn slow.) Or building the alternate system might require a > major bootstrapping phase, or requires downloading a JVM, etc.
The main selling point of Meson has been that it is a lot faster than autotools. > > Maybe the answer is "you should give up on portability to older systems as > > the cost of having a cleaner build system," and that's not an entirely > > unreasonable thing to say, but that's going to be a hard sell for a lot of > > upstreams that care immensely about this. > > Yeah, that too. There are still people building e2fsprogs on AIX, > Solaris, and other legacy Unix systems, and I'd hate to break them, or > require a lot of pain for people who are building on MacPorts, et. al. >... Everything you mention should already be supported by Meson. > - Ted cu Adrian
