Re: Shall we keep supporting Autotools?

[John Emmas <john creativepost co uk>]

On 15/10/2021 16:11, Kjell Ahlstedt via gtkmm-list wrote:

Glib, atk, pango and gtk4 have dropped Autotools support. They can only be built with Meson. Can we drop Autotools support for libsigc++, cairomm, glibmm, atkmm, pangomm, gtkmm, gtkmm-documentation and libxml++? Would anyone object?

I'm not sure about libxml++, because the underlying C library, libxml2, can't be built with Meson.

Admittedly this is a side-issue but as someone who prefers the Visual C++ IDE (and IDE's in general) I've hardly ever used Autotools - but then again I've hardly ever used Meson either.

Initially I'd high hopes for Meson because it could (supposedly) generate .vcxproj files.  But back in those early days, the generated files were often too limited to be useful.  One big problem (back then) was that Meson could only generate 1 x build target - either Debug or Release but not both in the same project.  In fact I'm not even sure if it could generate 32-bit and 64-bit targets in the same project.  I spend a lot of my time switching between the different targets so it was very frustrating to lose that ability.  I'd like to try Meson again but I'm just wondering if that limitation is still present?

John