Switching to the meson buildsystem

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

Hi all,

Alongside a lot of other GNOME modules, today I'm switching
gnome-software away from automake and to meson. Some reasons:

* I'm more competent using meson from 2 weeks of playing than from 10
years of copy-pasting things in m4
* The upstream meson community actually care about helping people make
things build, unlike automake
* The meson.build scripts are simple and powerful, and well documented
* Building gnome-software is typically 9x faster in my tests (!)

I know meson is a young project, but it's slowly being adopted by some
huge and important projects like mesa and wayland. I also evaluated:

* waf - waay too complex, as you are basically have all of python at
your disposal - also missing a vibrant community, faster than
automake, slower than meson
* cmake - just as ugly as automake, and also missing a lot of the
helper functionality so required a lot of c&p of modules, not much
faster than automake

If you need a hand with building using meson, it's basically the same
except the slight benefit/niggle that out-of-tree builds are now
required. You can get up to speed in 10 seconds doing:

mkdir build
cd build
meson --prefix=/wherever/you/want ../
ninja-build

See http://mesonbuild.com/ for more details.

Richard.