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Bug 787329 - Port to meson
Port to meson
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: folks
Classification: Platform
Component: general
git master
Other Linux
: Low normal
: Unset
Assigned To: folks-maint
folks-maint
Depends on: 786917
Blocks: 782980
 
 
Reported: 2017-09-05 20:12 UTC by Niels De Graef
Modified: 2018-09-21 16:10 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Niels De Graef 2017-09-05 20:12:45 UTC
Meson [1] is a new but powerful build system that is quickly being embraced in the GNOME community [2]. Porting to it would give us much more readable build files and *much* faster build speeds.

A WIP branch can be found at wip/nielsdg/meson


[1] https://mesonbuild.com/
[2] https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/GnomeGoals/MesonPorting
Comment 1 Philip Withnall 2017-09-11 08:43:48 UTC
I’m hesitant about this. folks is not currently actively developed, and so the benefits of switching to Meson will not affect many people. The downsides of porting are that it will likely break quite a few things which are currently working with the build system. I think this will have more disadvantages than advantages at the moment.
Comment 2 Niels De Graef 2017-09-28 10:48:40 UTC
I get that this might not seem like a feature with too many advantages, but there is one use case for which building with Meson matters a lot. When I build a nightly Flatpak for gnome-contacts, every change on a master branch of one of the modules (including e-d-s) triggers a rebuild for that module, and all modules that depend on it. Now, that means folks needs to be built each time a commit is made on e-d-s. Using autotools in folks means that these build can be painfully slow (compared to meson at least), making the flatpak build a real chore. By porting to meson, I hope to alleviate a bit of the pain there.

(That being said, I do agree with the lower priority, since I'm probably one of the few that stand to get a real benefit from it).
Comment 3 Philip Withnall 2017-09-28 11:20:39 UTC
That is an advantage, but the disadvantages (most likely breaking some features of the build system) are high.

This also ties in to the long-term plans for folks, which I still need to think about. There’s no point porting to Meson if the long-term plans for folks end up being ‘write a folks2 library from scratch in a language other than Vala’.
Comment 4 GNOME Infrastructure Team 2018-09-21 16:10:21 UTC
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/folks/issues/97.