Re: [bug #63641] Poor build parallelism in gettext

[Vincent Torri]

On Sun, Feb 12, 2023 at 12:51 PM Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> wrote:
>
> Vincent Torri wrote:
> > you can also try another build system. meson (and even faster, muon (a
> > c99 port of meson)) is a lot faster than autotools.
>
> Well, reading this [1] is enough for me:
>
>   "My experience with working on a project that's converted to Meson is that
>    its main flaw is its philosophical commitment to inflexibility. You do
>    things the Meson way or not at all.
>    - Want to have file foo/bar/baz.c compile to foo/bar/baz.o in the build
>      tree? Nope, must be foo_bar_baz.c.o.
>    - Want to have source files with a .inc.c extension which aren't compiled
>      like plain .c files? Nope, you need to rename them to .c.inc.
>    - Want to write a wrapper function around a Meson builtin like 'dependency'
>      that adds extra functionality to it? Nope, Meson doesn't provide
>      functions in its build scripting language.
>    - Want to have a build rule be "run this perl one-liner"? Tough, Meson will
>      mangle it by turning all the backslashes into forward slashes so you need
>      to put it into an external script file.
>    And on and on.
>    And we needed to upstream new functionality into Meson before we could even
>    convert to it in the first place!
>
>    My view of build tools is that they must provide flexibility and escape
>    hatches, because on a sufficiently complicated project eventually you're
>    going to need it.

all the freedesktop projects have been converted, as well as
gstreamer, gnome etc.. and I don't think they have trivial builds.

if there is really something that you can't do with meson with
gettext, I know some people that will be glad to help you.


Vincent Torri