[OE-core] Meson support in oe-core

[Leonardo Sandoval]

On Thu, 2017-08-10 at 13:11 +0300, Alexander Kanavin wrote:
> On 08/10/2017 12:10 AM, Randy MacLeod wrote:
> > Yep, total time for 'without gtk-doc' is *more* than cut in half!
> > 
> > The drop in configure time is certainly expected but the compilation
> > stage should be dominated by the compiler rather than make or ninja.
> > The 'without gtk-doc' compile difference mostly confirms that
> > but the 9% drop is odd. A couple of sources I've found assert that
> > for large projects and parallel builds a full build time is essentially
> > the same with ninja:
> >     http://david.rothlis.net/ninja-benchmark/
> > That work was done on a MacBook (!!) so it would be interesting to
> > see what the results are on a 24+ core Linux system. I might
> > give that a try tonight if there's nothing good on NetFlix.
> 
> To be honest, achieving faster build times is secondary in importance to 
> me. The important part is that autotools is one of the most awful pieces 
> of software ever written, and the less we have to deal with it in Yocto, 
> the happier we all will be. Upstreans generally share that POV.
> 
> Read this:
> http://blog.nirbheek.in/2016/05/gstreamer-and-meson-new-hope.html
> and this:
> http://voices.canonical.com/jussi.pakkanen/2011/09/13/autotools/
> 
> > By the way, systemd-234 has meson support and you (Alex) have sent
> > a patch update to 242 to the oe-core list but without switching to meson
> > as is reasonable. Anyway, 232 takes 51 seconds on my 16+16 core machine
> > so it would be a useful benchmark as well. Want to take a stab at that?
> 
> Oe-core master does not yet have any support for meson. We've done some 
> private work to bring it in, but it's not ready for submission yet. I 
> also want to build a few different recipes with it to make sure it 
> 'basically works' for several different things.
> 
> After meson support is in master, we can start converting recipes from 
> autotools to meson. That requires careful manual work, but the good news 
> is that it can be done piece-meal; there's no need to switch everything 
> at once.
> 

Alex, is there a autotools-to-meson guide? I like to participate on this
migration.

Leo

> My plan is to try gstreamer next, and after that, implement meson 
> support for gettext. It's a notorious bottleneck in many builds, due to 
> inexplicably slow autoconf (that even RP couldn't get down to the root 
> cause of).


> 
> Alex