[PATCH rendercheck 0/5] Convert to meson.

[Mark Kettenis]

> From: Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net>
> Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2017 13:17:45 -0700
> 
> Having bitten off a bit more than I can chew in 3 days with the X
> Server (hw/xfree86/sdksyms.c is the worst), I decided to take a quick
> pass at converting a project that's my own fault.

Seems I missed some discussion somewhere...

While I understand your frustrations with autoconf, moving to build
infrastructure that relies on tools like Python and Ninja would have
serious consequences for the way we integrate X into OpenBSD.  We
build the entire base OS, which includes X, with tools that are part
of the base OS.  That would become pretty much impossible if various X
projects go this way.

This is the first I've heard about Meson.  That in itself doesn't fill
me with confidence.  But the Meson documentation doesn't really
mentioned how you'd do configure-style checks like checking whether a
particular header file is present or whether a library defines a
certain function.  I suspect the answer is that people using Meson
don't do such tests and don't feel the need to do such tests because
they just check whether you're running on Windows, MacOS X or Linux
and make assumptions that things are present based on just that.  Your
new meson build system doesn't check whether the err.h file exists or
whether the C compiler supports the -Wshadow option for example.  It's
not really surprising that Meson is much faster if you cut out all
those checks.  Unfortunately this approach tends to yield rather
unportable software.

You can probably cut quite a bit of time from the autoconf configure
script run time by removing silly checks like checking for standard C
headers and such.