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Comment by eddieh | Hacker News Reader

Building X was already complex and annoying. While I hate autotools, I didn’t find Meson to be particularly better. If anything this is a lateral change. Instead of m4, shell, and makefiles, Meson has python, some python packages (managed with pip), and ninja. I guess Meson is faster, but I’m not convinced that justifies changing the build system especially since the speed up isn’t too significant.

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My own experience working on X server, clean ccache-based rebuild is a couple minutes faster on meson compared to autotools. These minutes add up quickly, switching my workflow to meson paid for itself the same day.

Last time I wanted to build anything Xorg-related, I found the fragmented repos to be also a barrier.

Both mean the project loses out on casual development -- ideally I would check out the "latest" code for the ecosystem, build it easily, verify my bug/problem still exists, make a change.

I'm not sure any friction at this stage is a good idea, so I hope the those with the experience of the codebase are making wise decision by changing the build process to one less widely available.

Meson doesn't depend on anything other than the Python standard library.

Okay, but builds can require additional python modules. Mesa requires Mako and won’t build without it.

But that's not because of Meson. It's just because Mesa authors wrote a code generator in Python; you'd need Mako even if the build system used autotools or hand-written makefiles.

Okay, my bad. I just tried a pre-Meson version of Mesa and you're right. I thought that Mako was some Meson extension...I didn't really look into it much. I was just annoyed when the build broke and Meson printed a message that looked like it was missing a dependency. Then I was doubly annoyed when pip told me Homebrew (or Linuxbrew) would break in the future. It seemed like Meson was a PITA, but that was my first experience with it. I was wrong and I apologize.

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