[Babel-users] Use of Meson+Ninja build systems to compile babeld

[Benda Xu]

Hi Antonin,

Antonin Décimo <antonin.decimo at gmail.com> writes:

> Following a more-or-less recent trend, I wrote some time ago a Meson
> build file for babeld.
>
> From [Meson][1] website:
>> Meson is an open source build system meant to be both extremely
>> fast, and, even more importantly, as user friendly as possible.
>
> If you're familiar with CMake, Meson achieves the same end result, but
> with ease and simplicity. Meson outputs a [Ninja][2] build file; a
> "small build system with a focus on speed". Notable projects using
> Meson+Ninja are Xorg, Mesa, GNOME. Ninja is also used by LLVM and
> Chromium.

Your examples are huge (and sometimes bloated) pieces of software that
are different from babeld.

Babeld is a lightweight and elegant tool that does not need you to
invent a new build tool to use it.

> I believe this would help compiling babeld with optimizations in mind
> (such as LTO), releasing source tarballs, binaries, and distro
> packages, and also help managing upcoming crypto dependencies.
> On my laptop, a clean build takes 5s with Meson+Ninja, from 10s with
> make.

5 seconds does not worth the extra complexity and bugs introduced by a
mason heavy software stack.

> I think (and hope) it will help distro packagers, especially when
> cross-compiling. The release process is eased, and the compilation
> time is fastened.

I am one of the distro packagers.  I testify that the present build
system is the simplest one we could expect.  Mason has been a headache
by pretending to be smarter than us to make implicit wrong decisions
during build and hard to debug.


Thank you for your enthusiasm and interest in babeld.  Hope to see you
soon in another pull request!

Cheers,
Benda