On 10/03/19 15:33, Markus Armbruster wrote: >> * is not particularly hard to deal with for the common cases >> ("add new source file" is straightforward) >> * 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.
The build system should make it trivial to do trivial things; easy to do things that are a matter of cut-and-paste from something that already exist; possible to do everything else. We are good at the first and barely acceptable at the second. The third depends on your definition of possible and on the effort you want to put in. My hope with a switch to Meson would be to keep the first just as trivial as it is now (commas and quotes do add visual weight but do not make things any less trivial; they are a nuisance but not a blocker); make the second easier; make the third hopefully much easier and at least more predictable. There is a possibility that sooner or later we'll find out something else that requires more Meson patches. Our build system is already quite mature, so that's at least not too likely, but it's obviously impossible to rule it out definitively. Paolo