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

[Bruno Haible]

Hello,

> 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.

> 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'm a contributor to the Yocto Project, and we would like to replace 
> autotools (as gettext's build system) with meson.

It does not make sense for a _distributor_ of software to replace its
build system. The main users of the build system are the maintainers;
it's them who decide about the build system.

As a distributor, you have to accept the build system of a package;
everything else is a maintenance nightmare. But why does it matter whether
it takes 15 minutes? Gettext releases don't come out more frequently than
once a month, and you surely don't have to build it for 30*24*4 = 2880
platforms?

I built a GCC 7.2.0 from source yesterday, which took ca. 8 hours, and
even that is acceptable!

Bruno