Peter Maydell <peter.mayd...@linaro.org> writes: > On Thu, 7 Mar 2019 at 06:39, Thomas Huth <th...@redhat.com> wrote: >> On 06/03/2019 19.12, Paolo Bonzini wrote: >> > lately I have been thinking of converting the QEMU build system to >> > Meson. Meson is a relatively new build system that can replace >> > Autotools or hand-written Makefiles such as QEMU; as a die-hard >> > Autotools fan, I must say that Meson is by far better than anything else >> > that has ever tried to replace Autotools, and actually has the potential >> > to do so. >> > >> > Advantages of Meson that directly matter for QEMU include:[...] >> >> I'm not objecting a new build system per se, but could you elaborate on >> problems of the current QEMU build system that will be fixed by this >> change? Since apart from some minor glitches (with the *.mak file >> dependencies for example), the current build system seems to work quite >> well for me ... so at least I currently don't feel enough pain yet to do >> such a big step, just because there is another new cool build system >> around... > > Yes, that tends to be my view. Our current build system: > * has no dependencies that are problematic for older hosts > (contrast Meson, which needs Python 3.5, even if we take > the drastic step of shipping an entire build tool along > with QEMU; OSX python is 2.7 still)
By the time Meson is ready for us, and we're ready for Meson, chances are even OS-X has moved on from Python 2. https://pythonclock.org/ > * is not particularly hard to deal with for the common cases > ("add new source file" is straightforward) Yes. Quite an achievement. > * covers all our requirements as far as I'm aware > (whereas you've listed a couple of places where Meson > would need changes/extensions to support things we do already) > * is generally flexible enough to be hackable to deal with odd > cases (it has escape mechanisms to generic-programmability, > even if they're ugly and awkward) Yes, it's hackable, but it takes quite a hacker to hack it. While it's reasonably easy to do simple things in it with basic voodoo skills, the learning curve goes up like the Zimbabwean inflation rate after that. I got plenty of experience in Make, and consider myself pretty fluent, yet I find myself running to Paolo for help. > So I think we'd need a more compelling reason to move right now. > (This might change in the future, eg if Meson catches on to the > extent that everybody is using it and competitors like CMake are > more obviously eclipsed by it, in the way that git took over > from svn and relegated mercurial and bzr to obscurity.) > > thanks > -- PMM
