Re: meson ground rules!

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Wed, 2016-11-23 at 14:35 +0530, Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
> From what I can understand, this is done specifically because distros
> such as Ubuntu and F23 do not ship a new-enough version of Meson
> quickly? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In particular, Ubuntu, yes. Fedora ships meson updates aggressively so
it's not really a problem here.

> If so, what's stopping us from adding a `meson` module to jhbuild
> instead of always using the system-provided package? Meson is pure
> Python so the module should be trivial to maintain.

It's certainly possible, but someone has to make it happen. Currently
meson and ninja are both "virtual sysdeps" which means the dependency
is added automatically for all meson modules, and there's no support
for doing that with non-sysdep modules. It could be done by removing
the virtual sysdep and manually adding a dependency from every meson
module to a meson module in core-deps, but it'd be better to have it
built-in like the dependencies for all other module types. Either way,
we could indeed drop the version requirement if you were to make this
happen.

> Meson has a very swift pace of development, and a one-year delay in
> the version that can be used is a bit harsh, don't you think? For
> instance, as existing modules are having experimental ports to Meson,
> we're finding that enhancements are necessary which necessitates the
> use of a new release. If modules have to continue to default to
> Autotools because of that, the Meson port won't get wider testing and
> we'll continue to be stuck with Autotools.
>
> I'd be happy to maintain the meson module in jhbuild if that's
> necessary.

Keep in mind that the version requirement only affects modules that
remove the Autotools build system.

Thanks,

Michael