Hi Richard,
let me just say, you worry too much. When I say we can't drop Make and you say we can't drop Meson, then most likely nobody will drop either. Also, nobody has mentioned yet dropping one solution before the other can take over (beside you).
On 28.10.20 14:41, Richard Hughes wrote:
On Wed, 28 Oct 2020 at 12:20, Nico Huber nico.h@gmx.de wrote:
So we didn't need these things before. Why do we need them now?
Meson makes it possible to build fwupd as a subproject of fwupd, on any architecture, on any distro, which means we can use libflashrom on machines that don't ship a new enough distro version.
That doesn't explain what doesn't work with the Makefile.
A lot of companies care (including Google) about using fwupd for updating
Not sure why you mention Google. Is that supposed to sound important? If flashrom's history shows anything, it's that even if the biggest IT companies rely on an open-source tool, it changes nothing for the project per se.
system firmware, and without libflashrom being available we'd just drop the flashrom plugin in fwupd, and in all honesty just reimplement the required bits of flashing to SPI directly.
I guess in the long run, you won't need much flashrom indeed. On Linux, it's best to do the hardware access in the kernel. Flashrom, OTOH, is focused to be multiplatform and hence does things in user space. And Linux kernel SPI drivers are catching up. Of course, I would be happy to hear that you still want to use (lib)flashrom even when all the hardware access is done in the kernel. But I also understand that there's always a trade-off.
As a project you can do as you like, but dropping meson would be a huge step backwards for people actually using flashrom in production systems and I'm sure would alter the future viability of the project.
I guess you miss how big flashrom already is without the updates fwupd installs with it. Especially when you account for the thanks the pro- ject gets: It only comes from users who call flashrom directly. No fwupd, no big company using it for production.
In my personal experience, Meson seems harder to maintain.
Seriously?! I think with a statement like that you should qualify it with the number of meson build fixes you've had to do so far.
Seriously?! Ripping lines out of context and then complaining about qualification?
Nico