Re: Upcoming changes

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Tue, 2017-04-04 at 15:34 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Hi
>
> 2017-04-04 15:11 GMT+02:00 Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com
> > :
> > In the 3.26 timeframe, several GNOME modules are looking to adopt
> > meson as
> > build system.
>
> Do we have an idea how many modules will use Meson in 3.26?

I don't. I would guess 5-15, somewhere in that ballpark, but it remains
to be seen. We don't have a coordinated effort to replace the build
system for many modules yet: it's being done by individual project
maintainers.

> Afaics, we already have modules which dropped the autotools build
> system.
> I guess it would be less disruptive if we supported both build
> systems
> for one or two release cycles. I understand that this means more work
> though. What's the official take on this issue from the release teams
> side?

We previously suggested that modules that were already ported to Meson
not drop Autotools support before 3.24 was released, and to my
knowledge all GNOME maintainers adhered to that request. For the 3.26
cycle, we believe it is appropriate for modules that are comfortable
with dropping support for Autotools to do so.

> > Apart from the python3 dependency (which shouldn't be a problem,
> > really),
> > this means that these modules will no longer have traditional 'make
> > dist'
> > style tarballs, since that is not  a feature meson has. Instead, we
> > will
> > look at providing git archive style tarballs, in order guarantee
> > reproducability - git tags can be moved too easily.
>
> I guess this also means, no longer shipping any pre-generated files
> in
> general. That affects
> - gtk-doc
> - vala

Yes, you should no longer expect to find any generated files in the
tarballs.

> At least in case of Vala, we have a downstream bug report [1], that
> the generated files are not reproducible.

This would be good to report upstream.

>  So be no longer shipping
> those files in the dist tarball, we would regress in that regard.
> On the other hand, I usually prefer to build as much as possible from
> source (this includes running autoreconf even for dist tarballs
> shipping a full autotools build system).
>
> I'm not sure if the Vala maintainers are already aware of that issue.
>
> That said, I have no problems with git style tarballs. As already
> said, I actually prefer rebuilding everything and not using
> pre-generated files.
>
> As for Meson: I'm excited to see that happening. While I don't have a
> lot of experience yet with that new build system, I liked what I saw
> so far. I also tried already to improve the Meson support in our
> Debian debhelper suite [2].
>
> Regards,
> Michael

Thanks Michael! If you run into Meson-related issues when transitioning
your Debian packages, do give us a ping. We want to make sure this
process goes smoothly for distributions.

Michael