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Re: [Qemu-devel] converting build system to Meson?
From: |
Markus Armbruster |
Subject: |
Re: [Qemu-devel] converting build system to Meson? |
Date: |
Sun, 10 Mar 2019 15:33:53 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.1 (gnu/linux) |
Peter Maydell <address@hidden> writes:
> On Thu, 7 Mar 2019 at 06:39, Thomas Huth <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On 06/03/2019 19.12, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> > lately I have been thinking of converting the QEMU build system to
>> > Meson. Meson is a relatively new build system that can replace
>> > Autotools or hand-written Makefiles such as QEMU; as a die-hard
>> > Autotools fan, I must say that Meson is by far better than anything else
>> > that has ever tried to replace Autotools, and actually has the potential
>> > to do so.
>> >
>> > Advantages of Meson that directly matter for QEMU include:[...]
>>
>> I'm not objecting a new build system per se, but could you elaborate on
>> problems of the current QEMU build system that will be fixed by this
>> change? Since apart from some minor glitches (with the *.mak file
>> dependencies for example), the current build system seems to work quite
>> well for me ... so at least I currently don't feel enough pain yet to do
>> such a big step, just because there is another new cool build system
>> around...
>
> Yes, that tends to be my view. Our current build system:
> * has no dependencies that are problematic for older hosts
> (contrast Meson, which needs Python 3.5, even if we take
> the drastic step of shipping an entire build tool along
> with QEMU; OSX python is 2.7 still)
By the time Meson is ready for us, and we're ready for Meson, chances
are even OS-X has moved on from Python 2.
https://pythonclock.org/
> * is not particularly hard to deal with for the common cases
> ("add new source file" is straightforward)
Yes. Quite an achievement.
> * covers all our requirements as far as I'm aware
> (whereas you've listed a couple of places where Meson
> would need changes/extensions to support things we do already)
> * is generally flexible enough to be hackable to deal with odd
> cases (it has escape mechanisms to generic-programmability,
> even if they're ugly and awkward)
Yes, it's hackable, but it takes quite a hacker to hack it. While it's
reasonably easy to do simple things in it with basic voodoo skills, the
learning curve goes up like the Zimbabwean inflation rate after that. I
got plenty of experience in Make, and consider myself pretty fluent, yet
I find myself running to Paolo for help.
> So I think we'd need a more compelling reason to move right now.
> (This might change in the future, eg if Meson catches on to the
> extent that everybody is using it and competitors like CMake are
> more obviously eclipsed by it, in the way that git took over
> from svn and relegated mercurial and bzr to obscurity.)
>
> thanks
> -- PMM
- Re: [Qemu-devel] converting build system to Meson?, (continued)
Re: [Qemu-devel] converting build system to Meson?, Daniel P . Berrangé, 2019/03/07
Re: [Qemu-devel] converting build system to Meson?, Paolo Bonzini, 2019/03/07
Re: [Qemu-devel] converting build system to Meson?, Daniel P . Berrangé, 2019/03/07
Re: [Qemu-devel] converting build system to Meson?, Stefan Hajnoczi, 2019/03/07
Re: [Qemu-devel] converting build system to Meson?, Alex Bennée, 2019/03/07