On 21 March 2022 22:04:07 WET, Greg Troxel gdt@lexort.com wrote:
Richard Hughes hughsient@gmail.com writes:
On Mon, 21 Mar 2022 at 20:04, Nico Huber nico.h@gmx.de wrote:
There is also one big general issue: we need to maintain two build systems now. We can't use GNU make only, because nobody knows what the requirements of the Meson users are.
My vote would be to remove the *Makefile*, and move 100% to Meson -- the modern build-system that's *already* being used by the packagers for all the supported architectures and OS builds on dozens of distros.
FWIW, the pkgsrc build is currently using the Makefile. I use that to get flashrom on NetBSD-9 amd64 to use with apu2.
More importantly, the instructions in the README in flashrom 1.2 do not mention meson and say to use make.
Similary, https://www.flashrom.org/Downloads#Installation_from_source does not mention meson. (It also doesn't mention that specifically GNU make is required, vs BSD make, but that's pretty common to omit.)
(I'm not claiming that building with meson wouldn't work, but just pointing out that "all packaging system builds use meson" is incorrect.)
So if there is any talk of removing makefiles, there needs to be a release with formal support for meson including it being the standard approach in REAMDE and a deprecation warning.
Beside from the documentation, the meson file currently only works for Linux and was never announced as official way to build flashrom. Dropping the Makefile is also no option as long as the meson.build does not work with all platforms supported by flashrom. In a release we should have a consisted build system across all those platforms. The two build systems are also topic of the next developer meeting. Imo we should find a proper solution for the meson build file and do not rush for the next release.
-- Thomas