Re: [libvirt] [dbus PATCH] build: convert to Meson/Ninja build system

On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 8:17 PM Pavel Hrdina <phrdina(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 06:53:30PM +0200, Fabiano Fidêncio wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 5:22 PM Pavel Hrdina <phrdina(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: > > > > > > Meson build system is simple and quick compared to Autotools and it's > > > able to fully replace our Autotools usage. There are few drawbacks as > > > it's a fairly new build system, it requires Python 3.5 and Ninja 1.5.0, > > > it's still evolving and the user base is not that large and there were > > > some tweaks required to achieve the same functionality. > > > > > > However, there are benefits, the configure and build time is way shorter > > > and build definition files are more readable and easier to maintain. > > > > Hmm. I really would prefer smaller patches. > > - Add meson; > > - Drop autotools; > > - Change spec files; > > - ... > > I was considering it but to me personally the whole switch in single > patch looked fine as there is not that much of a code to add/remove. > In addition it's easier to spot if something was not converted, but > I can split as I don't care that much. I don't have any strong opinions here either. So, just leave it as it is. > > > I didn't go through the patch, will do that in the next days ... but a > > few things should be considered here: > > - meson >= 0.49.0 basically means the project won't be built on Debian > > < 10, Ubuntu < 19.04 ... which may be a problem for the project, if > > you're following libvirt supported distros; > > Debian 9 has meson 0.37.1 so yes, this will mean you cannot build > upstream libvirt-dbus using distribution packages, but there is > Python3.5 so the possible workaround is to install meson using pip. > We don't packages which do not officially come with the distros in libvirt-jenkins-ci. I sincerely am fine dropping the support for old systems (I just did the same for osinfo-db-tools and libosinfo). However, this is a libvirt project and I'll leave for libvirt maintainers to decide what to do. > The same applies to Ubuntu and CentOS 7 as well. There is also a > possibility to bundle meson together with our projects but IMHO > installing meson using pip in user mode is a good enough workaround > if someone is crazy enough to run upstream code on these old > distributions. > > > - please, take a look at the work done on libvirt-jenkins-ci and try > > to adapt this one to follow the targets we have there; > > - It'll force the addition of a `ninja syntax-check`, instead of > > having the syntax-check as part of the tests; > > This is an intentional change to run syntax-check tests for dist target > as well, but it might be possible to configure it somehow. Anyway, I > would rather prefer to run syntax-check when running ninja dist than > having it as a separate target. osinfo-db-tools has it, libosinfo has it, libvirt-jenkins-ci uses it. This is a pattern already being used and here I have a strong preference for not changing the pattern if we can easily adapt to it.