On 22 March 2022 06:01:25 WET, David Hendricks david.hendricks@gmail.com wrote:
It will be good to understand why they are going this route and if it's better for the project in the long run.
Meson is easier to use, especially when you have to deal with a lot of different projects. All variables you need are well defined and usable across all projects which uses meson. The build options are accessible without the need to dig into the buildfile or project documentation. With Makefiles every project has its own set of options and variables. That is an overhead you have to deal with as package maintainer. From a project developer perspective meson takes away a lot of work you otherwise have to do by your own in the Makefile. For example system determination, searching for dependencies and cashing of the build configuration.
Personally I am more familiar with Make, but even I can see that our Makefile is one that only a flashrom developer could love.
I've spend a lot of time into the Makefile in the last month and my hope is that it's more readable by now. I'm truly not a fan of it and I would be happy if we can drop it. But implementation wise the meson.build is not better. It's a translation from the Makefile which makes only minimal use of mesons features.