Migration from autotools to meson

[Brian Tarricone]

Hi all,

There's been some discussion over on GitLab[0] about migrating to meson.  The current feeling is that it should be all-or-nothing for Xfce 4.20, at least for the core components (those under 'xfce/' on GitLab), so initially the autotools files would not be removed, at least until all components are migrated.  I'm very interested in getting this done, and am fine working on the shared components, and any component where the maintainer both doesn't have the time, and doesn't care/want to do it themselves.

Next is packaging; I know we have a bunch of distro packagers on the list here.  Do y'all have any concerns with this?  I was digging through the Meson documentation, and AFAICT the minimum Meson version we would need is 0.54.0 (which is four years old, and, for reference, both Debian stable and oldstable, as well as the current Ubuntu LTS release, have newer versions).

Depending on how much time I and the other maintainers have to work on this, this could be finished by 4.20 (which would maybe be released near the end of this year), but it might not be complete by then.  In the case where all core components are not migrated before 4.20, we would ship with the autotools build system, and not ship the Meson files in the tarballs for any component that has been migrated.

We haven't talked about a migration policy for non-core components (apps/, panel-plugins/, etc.), but my assumption is those would be done piecemeal, and each one wouldn't depend on other non-core components being migrated.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Brian

[0] https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-dev-tools/-/merge_requests/98