Re: Build System

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 11:40 AM, Tim Murphy <[email protected]> wrote:
> Meson is interesting. I think the most unique feature is being able to
> decide whether relinking is really needed when a library is changed. If the
> API hasn't changed then you can avoid relinking an exe when you update the
> app. Might be handy when one is e.g working on libpurple and testing the
> effect in pidgin.

The situation your describing should work right now.  I can go into
libpurple/ and "sudo make install && sudo ldconfig" and pidgin will
still work.

> Otherwise I would be more interested to try a build system with an inverted
> dependency tree like tup because this is a very smart and interesting way to
> not waste a lot of time working out what to build.

The majority benefit for Pidgin though is that while Pidgin is not a
GNOME application, it uses all of the GNOME libraries/tools.  When I
set CMake for GPlugin, I had to write a crazy macro for GObject
Introspection (already done in Meson) and I also had to write a crazy
macro for GNU Gettext (already in Meson).  One of the reasons I used
CMake in GPlugin is that it can generate different build systems,
including ones that work on Windows.

> Meson and scons are interesting for trying to take out the complexity and
> hide it. If you are lucky it all works without any customisarion and if you
> are not lucky the customisations that you need to make are quite complex.
> Whatever you do, you will need parallel build systems for a while.

It's not even so much the complexity that's hidden.  The thing I
really like about it is that feels a lot more like a build system than
shell, perl, and m4 do in autotools.  That said, we already have 2
build systems, one for !Windows and one for Windows.

> Regards,
>
> Tim

Thanks,

--
Gary Kramlich <[email protected]>

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