Dear flashrom community,
Currently, flashrom has support for two different build systems: the traditional Makefile-based approach, and meson. The latter was introduced not too long ago [1] to be used by the fwupd project. However, as far as I am concerned, it is currently not used for build-testing on upstream, and is thus prone to breakage. As a result, both build systems need to be kept in sync manually, which is an additional maintenance burden. On top of that, it appears to be that no one has been working on addressing this problem upstream.
In addition, looks like the Debian folks started using meson as well. Looks like binaries built using meson do not work correctly, e.g., the `-o` command-line option is unusable:
$ flashrom -p dummy -o logfile.txt flashrom v1.2 on Linux 5.2.0-2-amd64 (x86_64) flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org
Log file not supported in standalone mode. Aborting. Please run "flashrom --help" for usage info.
This problem can also be reproduced when building with meson on Arch Linux, so it is not specific to Debian. Needless to say, binaries built with the Makefile are unaffected.
So, given that meson produces broken executables and nobody seems to be actively taking care of it, what should we do with it? Is anyone interested in improving and maintaining the meson integration? All suggestions are welcome.
Best regards,
Angel