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

[Dave Reisner]

On Sun, Jul 08, 2018 at 06:10:09PM +0200, Andreas Baumann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Sorry, if this message is a little bit out of order, I only just
> subscribed to the pacman-dev group.
> 
> I want to raise the issue of bootstrapping:
> - automake, autoconf, libtool and friends need m4 and perl and bash
> - meson needs python
>
> Bootstrapping m4 and perl is comparatively easy to bootstrapping python.

So then build a minimal python as a "stage 1". You only need libffi and
expat, which themselves have no build dependencies beyond glibc.

Upstream has heard this argument before, thus:

http://mesonbuild.com/FAQ.html#why-is-meson-implemented-in-python-rather-than-programming-language-x
http://mesonbuild.com/Use-of-Python.html

> Porting to other architectures is easier if there are not too many
> dependencies.
> 
> See also my experiments here:
> 
> https://git.archlinux32.org/archlinux32/bootstrap32
> 
> and some porting work from oaken-source (Parabola):
> 
> https://github.com/oaken-source/parabola-riscv64-bootstrap

I'm not sure exactly what I'm supposed to get out of these. The reality
is that I don't really buy your argument. If you're bootstrapping Arch
Linux, you need to build Python anyways. You'll have to build Meson in
order to build systemd. You'll have to build Python in order to run
pacman's unit tests (you should absolutely care about these for
bootstrapping). Changing your bootstrap order to accomodate this doesn't
really seem that onerous.

> Cheers
> 
> Andreas
> 
> --
> Andreas Baumann
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