Re: [bug-gettext] replacing autotools with meson?

[Daiki Ueno]

Hello,

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

>> The larger reason is that meson as build system is a lot more pleasant 
>> to deal with, and many projects, particularly those affiliated with 
>> Gnome are switching to it. Gstreamer is perhaps the most well known.
>
> Well, I have seen several attempts at providing a good build system:
> SCons, CMake, quagmire, ninja, ... and none of them so far was attractive
> to the entire GNU community. (Although I do concede that ninja looks
> promising, because it follows the philosophy of "do one thing and do it
> right".)
>
> Gettext's build system is the GNU build system, because we want every
> GNU maintainer to be able to get familiar with Gettext's code when necessary.

I agree with this, but we don't need to switch over to the new build
system completely.  Several projects keep the GNU build system along
with the meson build system:

https://github.com/GStreamer/gstreamer
https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon

Of course, it could be a burden if one had to maintain two build systems
and some might drop either of them in the future.

Personally I am interested in how it could help reduce the build time.
If anyone experiments it and provides the benchmark result, that would
be nice.

>> The immediate reason is that getting to the point where gettext can be 
>> built takes an unusually long time: several minutes, and for no good 
>> reason that I can see, just lots of trivial tests like whether 
>> definitions are macros etc.
>
> The main reason that it takes a long time is that it is composed of
> several directories, each doing its own configuration. Maybe you can
> speed it up by passing a --cache option that points to an (initially
> empty) file?

I remember someone proposed to switch to non-recursive make and
eliminate AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS calls for performance reasons.  I suggested
the same and he told that it didn't help much.

Regards,
-- 
Daiki Ueno