Re: Meson feedback as a user

[Philip Withnall <philip tecnocode co uk>]

On Sun, 2017-07-02 at 15:37 +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Jul 2017 at 16:29, Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>
> wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 03:21:51PM +0100, Sam Thursfield wrote:
> > > On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 1:27 PM, Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet@gnome.o
> > rg> wrote:
> > > > Out of curiosity, let's look at other GNOME-related modules
> > that use
> > > > gtk-doc. What is the name of the option that enables gtk-doc?
> > > > - pango:        enable_docs
> > > > - gtk+:         enable-documentation
> > > > - graphene:     enable-gtk-doc
> > > > - atk:          enable_docs
> > >
> > > We should indeed work to make these names consistent across GNOME
> > > modules. Having a page on the wiki where we list standard option
> > names
> > > for Meson build systems would be a good start.
> >
> > To make the names consistent, the best way is to write the name in
> > only
> > one place, i.e. in meson itself or a meson function/macro. Not in
> > each
> > individual modules.
> >
> > Like the GTK_DOC_CHECK Autotools macro.
>
> Currently, Meson modules cannot define options, but it's something
> that would be useful, and AFAIR there's an issue opened about it.
> > The same for compiler flags, with the Autotools there is the
> > AX_COMPILER_FLAGS macro. With meson it seems that the flags are
> > listed
> > in each GNOME module.
>
> On the other hand, having a common set of warnings is broken and it
> demonstrably does not work, as I've found after having to fix the
> various modules that were moved to AX_COMPILER_FLAGS.
>
> There is a subset of warnings you want for C - and those should go in
> Meson's warning_level option. Differently projects have very
> different requirements: there is no "one size fits all" or alias for
> an ever changing set of warnings - otherwise we'd all run with
> -Wextra and -Werror.

The statements
“There is a subset of warnings you want for C”
and
“there is no "one size fits all" or alias for an ever changing set of
warnings”
seem to be incompatible. AX_COMPILER_FLAGS is meant to provide that
‘subset of warnings you want for C’. If you think the set of warnings
it enables is incorrect, please bring that up with me (in a different
ML thread, I don’t want to take this one off topic).

I think the --disable-Werror option and other logic that
AX_COMPILER_FLAGS provides for consistently enabling/disabling compiler
warnings for different build environments is useful. Please don’t gloss
over that.

Philip

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