xorgproto build system (was Re: [PATCH xserver 00/10] Implement RandR 1.6)

[Adam Jackson]

On Sat, 2018-02-03 at 14:28 -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
> Adam Jackson <ajax at nwnk.net> writes:
> 
> > Got impatient and hacked on this a bit more:
> > 
> > https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/xorgproto/
> 
> Thanks for taking this on. It looks great.
> 
> I have a question -- is there any place which we care about that doesn't
> have meson support yet? If not, then might I gently suggest that we
> simply never release this with autotools support?

I'm likely to want new protocol bits in a future RHEL7 update, yeah. I
don't know how many such updates, but I'd bet at least one. If it were
just this one package I'd be fine with backporting stuff to the old
split modules in 7, but if that assumption bubbled out to xserver's
build system - that needing RANDR 1.6 implied already having meson -
that'd be a bit more annoying.

Now, can we call the meson build official and do the releases from
that, probably yes with some more work. util/modular/release.sh doesn't
know about meson yet, which is straightforward to add. The tarballs
would be .tar.xz. xz has been optionally supported since 2013, this
would make it mandatory unless we created gz/bz2 ourselves. Would
anyone have a problem with only making xz tarballs?

> Also, is there any way we could have the 'autogen.sh' file (or similar)
> do all of the necessary meson bits so I don't have to remember how to
> run that command?

I bet we can! gnome-shell has an adaptor script for the gnome build API
which expects a ./configure, and it's even BSD licensed. We could stash
a copy of that in util/modular for future reference.

- ajax