Meson build for FOX 1.7 branch

Francesco Abbate <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lib.fox-toolkit.user
Message-ID <CAABEgWqUs96UfOyX1Q60tiQ99RX53noMvcfTYipQRy-Dxf5qig@mail.gmail.com>
Dear all,

I have recently prepared a meson build configuration for the FOX 1.7
branch, I had previously a meson build for the 1.6 branch.

It can be found in the repository:

https://github.com/franko/fox-1.6

in the fox-1.7 branch:

https://github.com/franko/fox-1.6/tree/fox-1.7

It actually provides the FOX release 1.7.77.

Please note that I may rename the repository and choose the FOX 1.7 branch
as the master branch. The FOX 1.6 will remain available as a separate
branch.

## What is Meson and why a Meson build for the FOX toolkit ?

Meson is a modern, cross-platform build system that works much in the same
way as cmake but with a simple and clear language and well thought
functions. It is used in many high-profile projects like Mesa 3D, Gnome and
many others.

With Meson it is extremely simple to create a build system for a simple
project and it does the right thing by default, on all the major platforms.
On the other hand it supports advanced options and needs of larger and
complex projects by staying reasonably simple.

From the user point of view it provides little advantages over the
configure script except it is faster to build. In addition it requires
python3 and ninja but these are widely used anyway.

The main advantage of Meson is for the developers. I think the autotools
are too obscure and complicated and they are tailored for unix-like systems
and difficult to use on Windows where they require a full unix environment
to work.

People sometimes prefer cmake to meson because cmake is more widely used
and a sort of de-facto standard for C++ projects. Personally I strongly
dislike cmake because it is too complicated.

One practical reason for me to write the Meson build was that building of
the FOX library on Windows using mingw64 and msys2 was very very long.
Using the Meson build it is much faster because there are less child
processes created, we touch less the filesystem and all the CPU cores are
automatically used.

## Status of the Meson build

I think the Meson build I provided is very accurate and very close to the
original, configure-based build. I tested on Windows and Linux and building
either as a shared or static library is well supported.

I would be glad, Jeroen, if you want to include into the project the Meson
build configuration. In this case please let me know or just simply grab
the meson files from my repository.

Kind regards
Francesco

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