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Re: Future plans for Autotools


From: Eli Schwartz
Subject: Re: Future plans for Autotools
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2021 16:01:18 -0500

On 1/22/21 2:48 PM, Nick Bowler wrote:
I don't have enough experience with Meson to say.  Mainstream free
software packages have only very recently started using it.  On the
GNU side, glib-2.60 (ca. 2019) converted to meson and I am able to
build it.  If possible, I will have to try again in 2039.  I bet the
autoconf-based glib-1.2.10 tarball from 2001 will still mostly work,
and so will the 1996 version of GNU Bison.

Difficult to say, indeed.

I know this much, though. CMake seems to have this philosophy where build rules do different things depending on your version of cmake, and depending on which version that is, you *might* be able to specify https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.0/manual/cmake-policies.7.html to go with the old or new behavior.

meson prefers to deprecate things that were decided "this is bad", and issue warnings maybe forever (I think it's been considered to drop deprecated, warning-raising functions for the 1.0 milestone? not guaranteed), then reimplement the better functionality as a new function or function keyword argument. The idea is specifically to avoid changing how old build files get processed. Instead, if developers want their builds to configure without big yellow warnings, they need to migrate to "the newer way".

Obviously this doesn't guarantee meson is always *successful* in being backwards-compatible. :)

--
Eli Schwartz
Arch Linux Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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