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. A lot of companies care (including Google) about using fwupd for updating 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. 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.
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.
I'm used to Make, and Meson (itself and the integration in flashrom) is young.
Well, it's good enough for hundreds of other much larger and older projects, including the likes of wayland, gstreamer, gtk and systemd. I guess it comes down to if "what you are used to" v.s. "what is best for the project".
So how about you bring the Meson build up-to-speed first? and once it's able to produce the same binaries on all platforms decide if it's working out?
What binaries is it missing? This email sounds more like "I don't understand X, we have to rip it out for everyone". I guess you've done your research and found out which distros shipping flashrom are using, either the make-based version or the meson-based version. That might help you make up your mind.
Richard