State of Pidgin: Build System

[Eion Robb]

TBH I don't really care much about which build system we use as long as it
works :)

As a side note, just changing the build system doesn't 100% help with
Visual Studio due to an incompatibility between time_t with msvc (its
always 64bit) compared to mingw (where it's the sizeof int)

A few questions I have about the change:

Does meson provide a way to compile using mingw?
Does meson help with cross-compiling?
Would meson just be used for 3.0?
Would you just use meson for one repo (RE: other email about splitting
libpurple/Pidgin/Finch) first or would you suggest it be used for all repos?

On 3 October 2017 at 18:58, Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com> wrote:

> 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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