[OE-core] Issues with meson in SDK with cross-file

[Nirbheek Chauhan]

On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 3:20 PM, Nirbheek Chauhan
<nirbheek.chauhan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If we want to setup a cross-file to use these arguments, we would have to
>> generate the cross-file on-the-fly (not good).
>
> Out of interest, why is that not good? That is precisely what Gentoo
> does and it has to solve the same problems here that Yocto is facing.
>

To expand on this, the reason why meson requires a cross file for
cross-compilation is because we allow build files to use both native
and cross compilers within the same build. This is quite useful when
you want to build a tool (or generator) as part of the project that
you then use to build/generate other things that are used in the cross
build.

That workflow is really difficult or impossible in Autotools and
CMake, but it's a surprisingly common use-case.

Generating cross files is quite easy since they're INI files[1]. If
you use the same toolchain for the entire build, you only need to
generate it once.

1. https://docs.python.org/3/library/configparser.html

Cheers,
Nirbheek