autotools to meson: policy?

[tlaronde at kergis.com]

I still liked to have a Xorg developers' expressed policy about these
points:

- Has the meson framework to provide at least the configuration
flexibility provided by autotools, so that whoever is compiling Xorg
could, in the future, configure it the way it managed to do with
autotools?
	=> See: http://notes.kergis.com/x11_building.html
		for notes about differences or misses in variable
		configurations.

- What to do when python byte-compiling is involved? The problem is
that it is _not_ cross-compilation safe (the byte-compiled version is
not portable and there is no cross-python).
	=> The byte-compilation should be done at _install_ time
	depending on system (OS and machine) and python version
	available on target;
		=> At minimum, byte-compiling should be an option;
	
	=> We have, for safety, to compare the results obtained, with
	a default config on some CI platform, by calling autotools and
	meson. The problem is then to be sure that using the meson's
	python module yields the same hierarchy of byte-compiled
	files as autotools (since the builds are not made at the same
	time, SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH has to be set and used by the 2
	frameworks to allow comparing the byte-compiled versions);

		- Are we sure that starting from some version of meson,
		at least for CI, the results will be the same as with
		autotools (same hierarchy; meson's python module needs
		to be called several times to compile with different
		optimization levels)?

		- Python on OSes is not a road paved with roses. Due
		to incompatibilities between versions, OSes segregate
		versions in distinct subdirs---this is not what is
		exposed in Python documentation, where differing
		byte-compiled versions are in an uniq subdir of the
		scripts module;
			=> How to ensure that the meson framework will
			allow the OSes to place the python stuff where
			they want it, and with the result achieved via
			autotools? [*]

*: for this, I have chosen for xcbproto (I know: it depends on another
church) to provide POSIX.2 scripts to search for python and to
byte-compile, allowing to use the scripts also at install time and
allowing OSes not using python (and hence not using meson) to be able
to do things.

TIA for answers,
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
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