On 25/04/2021 19:01, Emmanuele Bassi
wrote:
I'd consider this a plus, given that plain Makefiles are
usually tragically less performant. Plus, Meson doesn't
*only* target Ninja: it generates Visual Studio project
files, and the Meson maintainer is working on improving the
XCode support.
I'm not that concerned about build time performance.
I am very much concerned about build time performance. First of all, it impacts our CI pipeline, but more importantly: tighter change-build-test cycles are fundamental to avoid contributor burnout.
Switching to a faster (and less fickle) build system has improved every single project I've contributed to.
I'm more
concerned about how easy it is to fit into our Yocto based build
system. I know how to integrate autotools projects, plain makefiles,
and even cmake. I'm not sure what's involved in integrating Meson.
I have talked to the Yocto developers (many of whom are former colleagues of mine), and they assured me that switching to Meson is entirely supported and, to be honest, an improvement over Autotools. In many cases it's merely a case of changing the project's recipe from `inherit autotools` to `inherit meson` (and, of course, changing the syntax of the build options, if any are explicitly specified).
Emmanuele.