[pacman-dev] interest in using meson over autotools?

[Dave Reisner]

On Sat, Jul 07, 2018 at 07:58:36PM -0400, Andrew Gregory wrote:
> On 07/07/18 at 07:13pm, Dave Reisner wrote:
> > ...
> > Would there be interest in accepting patches to make these changes? I
> > propose we would carry both build systems in parallel for a major
> > release before eventually dropping autotools.
> > 
> > Feedback wanted,
> > dR
> 
> I've hated the experience every single time I've had to deal with our
> autotools setup, so I'm definitely open to change.  Our test suite is
> currently integrated with it, though.  What changes would we have to
> make to our tests for meson?
> 
> apg

This is one area where Meson could use some improvement. There's generic
support for tests, but no specific support for tests using TAP. There's
an open issue where someone explicitly has requested this:

https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/2923

Towards the end, there's some suggested workarounds for the current
limitations.

I think the answer is ideally that we have no make no changes at all to
our tests. We could do all of the work in the build system alone -- use
a harness to wrap each test and parse the TAP output.