Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 3/7] configure: integrate Meson in the build system

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 03:16:01PM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>  Hi,
> 
> > Ok, I can understand that. I've been thinking about how we can switch
> > libvirt to use meson too, and trying to decide between meson being the
> > owner, calling out to make  vs keeping make as the owner and calling
> > out to meson. Ultimately to entirely banish make, autoconf, automake,
> > libtool, m4 & shell from our build system :-)
> > 
> > Despite thinking about an incremental conversion though, I was still
> > hoping libvirt would just have a single (largish) patch series to
> > do a complete conversion at a specific point in time.
> 
> Another possible approach would be to have two build systems.
> The traditional configure & make and the new meson & ninja.
> 
> Advantage is we don't have to worry about the transition and mixing &
> make + meson at all.
> 
> Disadvantage is the duplication.  That wouldn't be forever though.
> I'd expect we'll have one or maybe two releases with both build systems,
> then delete the make & configure.

Personally I strongly wish to avoid having two parallel build systems.
In several projects I've encountered with that I've ended up hitting
bugs where each build system produced different binary results  due to
the developers not putting the same changes into both build systems.

Prefer to only merge a new build system once there is confidence that
it is working, and then immediately delete the old one so as to avoid
bitrot & concentrate any bug fixing on the modern stuff.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: https://berrange.com      -o-    https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org         -o-            https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
|: https://entangle-photo.org    -o-    https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|