Migration from autotools to meson

[Hunter Turcin]

On Tue, 2024-04-09 at 22:20 -0700, Brian Tarricone wrote:
> 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

Here are my thoughts, though keep in mind I haven't been very active
with Xfce development lately:

I like the proposal to move to Meson. In my opinion, Meson build
scripts are easier to read, understand, and edit than Autotools
scripts, which makes maintenance easier. The documentation you have in
that xfce4-dev-tools merge request is really appreciated. If your
proposal gets adopted, I would be willing to spend some time to migrate
some of the non-core applications. Would you consider your merge
request for migrating xfwm4[1] to be a good reference/example on how to
do such a migration, once it is merged?

[1]: https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4/-/merge_requests/147/diffs

Hunter Turcin
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