Using Meson to build flashrom

[Richard Hughes]

Hi all,

First, happy new year and I hope you all had a great break. As some of
you know, I've been working with 3mdeb for the last few months, with
the aim of using libflashrom in fwupd to be able to flash firmware
using the LVFS on various embedded systems. This /could/ include
flashrom-compatible consumer hardware in the future, although I've not
worked out all the details on how something like coreboot-on-thinkpad
could be distributed automatically. Anyway, I digress.

The fwupd project has to build in all kinds of odd targets, e.g. for
odd endians, odd instruction sets, and in odd ways, e.g. installing
with a prefix of /app for projects like flatpak. We also have other
"robustness" guarantees and therefore have a comprehensive set of CI
tests which enable a lot of warning flags and run linting and static
analysis code like Coverity. This might explain my ongoing effort to
fix up seemingly benign warnings.

Rather than hack the hell out of Makefile (which I started to do
initially) I ported the codebase to use the meson build-system. Meson
is a(nother) next-generation build system used by a lot of open source
projects ranging from low level libraries to desktop software. As part
of the port, I also copied the CONFIG_ logic from the makefile, e.g.

Option                  Current Value Possible Values Description
  ------                  ------------- --------------- -----------
  config_atahpt           false         [true, false]   Highpoint
(HPT) ATA/RAID controllers
  config_atapromise       false         [true, false]   Promise ATA
controller
  config_atavia           true          [true, false]   VIA VT6421A
LPC memory
...

At the moment I'm using the meson port so I can include flashrom as a
subproject to fwupd (as distros are not yet shipping libflashrom as a
proper shared library) but 3mdeb is some way from being finished with
libflashrom. I wondered if my work would be useful already to anyone
else building flashrom on weird embedded architectures, or of it would
be interesting to upstream with further work. The single commit which
just adds 5 files can be found here:
https://github.com/hughsie/flashrom/tree/wip/hughsie/meson

Comments welcome.

Richard.