Hi Richard, Jonathan, and everyone else,
On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 12:00 PM Richard Hughes hughsient@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 26 May 2020 at 00:20, Angel Pons th3fanbus@gmail.com wrote:
So, given that meson produces broken executables and nobody seems to be actively taking care of it
Errr, I am taking care of it. Is it broken now?
Well, as I stated previously, flashrom built with meson results in the `-o` option not working at all. When helping others via IRC, we recommend fetching flashrom logs using that option so that no messages get lost, so not being able to rely on it is rather inconvenient.
I can see [1] that you have two changes on gerrit, one of which is currently not submittable due to merge conflicts and has not been touched in two months. As far as I can tell, that's it. Are there any future plans for meson, such as making Jenkins build-test it? Edward O'Callaghan is working on unit testing [2], and it would be great if Jenkins could actually run these tests alongside the usual build tests. There isn't a thing such as too much coverage, or is there? :-P
Feel free to propose any ideas here in the mailing list, so that we can discuss them beforehand. Working on something big without having previously talked it through with the rest of the community is dangerous: one can end up wasting lots of time working on something that is then rejected, then emotions overflow and then everyone and everything ends up on fire... I've had that happen several times and it has always been extremely frustrating, so let's do it right this time, shall we? :-)
On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 12:03 PM Richard Hughes hughsient@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 26 May 2020 at 03:27, Jonathan A. Kollasch jakllsch@kollasch.net wrote:
Remove meson support.
Removing meson support from flashrom would mean dropping the fwupd plugin that uses libflashrom; we have to build flashrom from a subproject as very often we're depending the very latest API additions.
I believe dropping meson support should only be a last-resort measure, so I brought up the topic on the mailing list to calmly and respectfully exchange ideas about it and work towards improvement. Let's be honest, we will never be able to make each and every being on this planet completely happy, but we can surely attempt to find a middle ground that is good enough for all of us, the flashrom community.
Meson is no less broken than our home-grown Makefiles.
Can you substantiate that?
Please refer to the aforementioned bug about `-o` not being usable when building with meson. While the home-grown Makefiles may have bugs, they have survived the test of time and should be considered the official way to build flashrom, especially considering that Jenkins relies on them to build-test flashrom patches.
If possible, I would consider turning meson into a wrapper around the Makefiles, to eliminate redundancy. However, as I do not know a thing about meson, I have no idea if such a thing is doable. As you seem to be more familiar with meson than I am, what are your thoughts on this idea? Is there a better way to handle that?
Richard.
Best regards,
Angel
[1]: https://review.coreboot.org/q/owner:richard%2540hughsie.com [2]: https://review.coreboot.org/41622