Meson config failure

[Jack <ostroffjh users sourceforge net>]

Hello Peter,

Per you note about gnome config questions, I decided to try meson.  My  
first attempt at config (just running "meson ../balsa-git" in the build  
directory) completed but pointed out I had to use either  
--without-gnome or --with-libsecret.  That is correct, as I'm on a  
mostly KDE system, with minimal gnome components.

First note - unless I've missed something, the meson syntax is pretty  
restrictive, needing -Dwith-something=value.  You can't omit the value  
(mainly true or false).  Not an issue, but FYI.

Second note - With the config line I gave it, it couldn't find any html  
converter (even though I have html2text installed, but I'll deal with  
that next) and then failed.  The output ends with:

Message: You cannot properly quote html-only messags.
Meson encountered an error in file meson.build, line 277, column 14:

Line 277 in meson.build is "if gpgmever.version_compare('< 1.8.0')" and  
"gpgme-config --version" returns "1.8.0".
Looking at the end of meson-logs/meson-log.txt, and it ends with

Message: You cannot properly quote html-only messags.
Running command: /bin/true --version

Meson encountered an error in file meson.build, line 277, column 14:
Uncomparable version string 'true (GNU coreutils) 8.25\nPackaged by  
Gentoo (8.25 (p1.1))\nCopyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation,  
Inc.\nLicense GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later  
<http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.\nThis is free software: you are  
free to change and redistribute it.\nThere is NO WARRANTY, to the  
extent permitted by law.\n\nWritten by Jim Meyering.'.

and that is indeed the output of  "/bin/true --version".  I suppose my  
qeustion is why meson is running /bin/true instead of gpgme-config at  
this point.  I have no idea if it is a side effect of not finding  
html2txt or if it is a real bug in meson.  It's is a separate issue  
whether /bin/true should be so verbose instead of just returning "8.25"  
but I'll leave that alone for now, since I don't think it's really  
important.

Any suggestions?  (In the meantime, I'm going to see if I can correctly  
point it to html2text, or at least tell it not to need it.)

Jack