State of Pidgin: Build System

[Gary Kramlich]

Greetings Programs!

If you have not yet seen the introduction email with a subject of "State of
Pidgin: Introduction", please go read it first.

As some of you may be aware, we added support for meson
<http://mesonbuild.com/> which is a new build system that was created for
gstreamer.  Meson was created due to the barrier to entry that autotools
creates.  Having been created for a GNOME project means that all of the
GNOME stuff is a first class citizen.  But more importantly than that is
that it supports Linux, BSD, Windows, and MacOS.  It's also worth
mentioning that most of the smaller GNOME projects have already made the
move to meson only.

On UNIX systemsIt generates ninja <https://ninja-build.org/> files which on
our testing, builds pidgin about 40% faster on average.  But it also can
export Visual Studio projects as well as XCode projects.  This has long
been a pain point for a lot of people when they want to use libpurple.
Meson fixes this problem with no work from us what so ever (as far as I
know).

Qulogic has done an amazing job working with the Meson developers on
getting it to work well with PIdgin as well, and he should be able to
answer any of the more technical questions you may have about it.

That said, I am proposing that we remove both the autotools build system as
well as the Windows MinGW makefiles from the project and standardize on
Meson and Meson only.  So please, discuss.

Thanks,

--
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>
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