D, SCons and Meson

Russel Winder <[email protected]> Mon, 29 Aug 2016 09:10:37 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.programming.tools.scons.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
In case you hadn't heard, Meson is the "new kid in town" on the build
front. It is a Python front end to a Ninja back end. It is clearly in
the SCons and Waf tradition (with some CMake) but very much a Ninja
backend replacement to Autotools in it's entirety. Meson will make Waf
(and CMake?) irrelevant not for any technical reasons, but because the
GNOME/GUADEC type folks are seeing Meson as the replacement for their
Autotools build – for those that do not think Autotools is all they
will ever need. i.e. it is getting rapid traction.

Debian maintainers are already seeing it as a main build player where,
sadly, SCons never really made it. Waf was rejected since it maintained
the position of being in the project not in the distribution. This is a
really interesting tension: Gradle has driven the "in the project" idea
to being the norm in the JDK world (and also some of the C++ world),
but this is not acceptable with many contexts including Debian and
Fedora.

Why am I emailing this at all? Well it relates to D-related stuff. I
had been trying to make SCons the D build of choice for those not using
Dub. However Meson has come charging in and has taken pole position in
the Debian and likely Fedora communities as the build of choice for D-
related packaging. Yes SCons could still be used, but I suspect Meson
is going to win this game.

I am still intending to create a dependency handling system in SCons
for D to communicate with the Dub repository for downloads to get and
build (using the Dub default locations), but instead of being primary,
this will now be a port of the Meson version.

Unless I have missed something (*), SCons hasn't picked up the ideas of
Gradle, Maven, Cargo, Dub, Herd, Go, Pip/PyPI, Ruby Gems, etc. that
there are repositories of artefacts (compiled in the JDK world, source
in the native code and interpreter worlds), it is still about a pre-
2000 view of project. Neither have CMake or Waf really, but it seems
Meson is going this direction. A generalized Cargo/Dub/Go style
mechanism of getting source code dependencies from a repository as a
calculated dependency. This is a Big Win™ in modern software
development – except for big companies that have unitary proprietary
codebases.

SCons remains the One True Way™ for XeLaTeX builds obviously, but I am
likely to be doing less and less SCons stuff due to the Debian and
Fedora packaging focus and the rise of Meson (**).
 

(*) Entirely possible, my uses of SCons are really rather
straightforward.

(**) I am convinced Meson is not a flash in the pan that goes away such
as Rant, and Rake really. The traction it is getting with projects like
GStreamer seem to indicate it is here to stay, that CMake is the loser
and that Autotools will fade away gradually.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:[email protected]
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: [email protected]
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

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