Re: Build system considerations

[Werner LEMBERG]

> [...] I have experience with CMake (I find it a vast improvement
> over auto-tools for package / feature detection, but a hot mess for
> about anything else), GN/Ninja (very powerful, but essentially
> requires too much dependencies to get the most out of it) and Bazel
> (can be hard to get into, very powerful, but requirements are a bit
> crazy at the moment).  I'm curious about Meson.

I still favor autotools over cmake.  Especially the syntax of the
latter makes me cringe :-) On the other hand, we *do* have contributed
cmake support and some reports both for bugs and improvments in the
bug tracker for it.

And I haven't tried ninja or mason; this is lazyness on my side since
I'm not involved in any project that uses those build systems.

Whatever we do, I strongly believe that the build system using
autotools must stay.  Maybe we can enhance it by using automake...

Note that improvement of FreeType's build system is also a potential
GSoC project (see https://www.freetype.org/gsoc.html); this year there
was no proposal for that, however.


    Werner