[debhelper-devel] Bug#795253: Add support for Meson build system

[Michael Biebl]

Hi Niels,

with the release of GNOME 3.24, quite a few GNOME components have
started to support the Meson build system (in addition to autotools).
There are even plans for some of them to be Meson-only in the future. So
this issue will become relevant for the Debian GNOME team.

On Wed, 12 Aug 2015 16:31:41 +0200 Niels Thykier <niels at thykier.net> wrote:
> 
> On 2015-08-12 11:55, Jussi Pakkanen wrote:

> > 
> > Please add support for building packages using the Meson build system. The
> > exact build steps to take are the following.
> > 
> > [...]

> 
> I got a couple of questions:
> 
>  * How many packages in Debian are (or will in the near future) be
>    using this build system?

In GNOME 3.24 I'd say we have around a dozen or more packages supporting
Meson. This list is expected to grow significantly though.

> 
>  * What (build-)dependencies are required for building a package with
>    Meson/ninja (beyond build-essential)?

The most important bit is probably that meson is implemented in python3,
but doesn't have any additional dependencies aside from that.
ninja(-build) is a rather small C/C++ application.



>  * Is it possible to reliably auto-detect if an upstream is using Meson
>    like it is with other build systems such as autoconf+make?
>    - If not, it can at best be a "manually invoked" build system.

A meson.build file is probably a good indicator that meson is supported.
As mentioned earlier, at least some of the GNOME projects will support
autotools and meson/ninja in parallel for some time. So we'd need a
mechanism to choose which one to use.

Niels, do you have any preference how we should approach this:
Have a separate dh-meson package (built from a separate source package)
with the option to merge it into debhelper later or should we start
implementing this directly within debhelper?

Regards,
Michael



-- 
Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth?

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