Re: Proposal for Gnome Goal (was Re: Switching from Autotools to CMake for core evolution products)

[Philip Withnall <philip tecnocode co uk>]

On Mon, 2016-10-10 at 10:49 +0200, Sebastian Geiger (Lanoxx) wrote:
> On 05/10/16 15:39, Michael Biebl wrote:
>
> > As much as I hate autotools and its arcane syntax, it does bring
> > uniformity and consistency.
> > Atm I'm counting waf (for some non-core modules), autotools, cmake and
> > some are discussing to use meson/ninja.
> >
> > So while I'm not tied to autotools, I would hate to see if every
> > modules maintainer chooses his/her own build system of choice. This
> > makes it really cumbersome as downstream/integrator.
> Maybe it would make sense to introduce an official Gnome Goal that 
> encourages every module maintainer to switch over to
> meson.
>
> This would of course mean that we already know meson will be the build 
> system of choice and that it fits the
> needs of all modules. Of course individual module maintainers would 
> still be free to make a different choice or to stick with autotools but 
> we would at least have something to motivate the migration, to track its 
> status across all modules and it would be a push to towards some level 
> of consistency. Also we could collect some best practices from modules 
> that have already done the conversion on a Gnome Goal page.

I don’t think we’ve ported enough modules as testbeds yet. Meson is too new
to jump into encouraging everyone to port GNOME modules en-masse.

Maybe the goal could be proposed in 6 months once Meson has matured a bit
more and more modules have dogfooded it?

Philip