Re: Meson feedback as a user

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi Michael;

On 4 November 2017 at 01:59, Michael Biebl <mbiebl gmail com> wrote:
> Hi there
>
> 2017-09-05 19:48 GMT+02:00 Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>:
> > On 5 September 2017 at 18:40, Michael Biebl <mbiebl gmail com> wrote:
>
> > > Has there been some effort to consolidate the names?
> >
> > We're still in the process of migrating projects. The migration was
> > slowed down for the release of GNOME 3.26.
> >
> > I fully expect this to become a goal for the 3.28 development cycle,
> > while we migrate more projects to Meson; I'll make sure to add a
> > sub-page for the porting effort under
> > https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/GnomeGoals/MesonPorting
>
> Afaics there is no such page yet which documents the list of preferred
> build switch names or am I simply not finding it?

A couple of weeks ago I updated the Wiki page on the Meson port[0]
with some of the best practices:

```
If your project has configuration options for the Autotools build make
sure to port them all to the Meson one, following these style
guidelines

 - Drop the "enable" from --enable-foo boolean options; Meson has
boolean values, so -Denable-foo=true would read as redundant, and
-Denable-foo=false would read as contradictory. Use -Dfoo=true or
-Dfoo=false instead
 - Similarly, you should drop "with" from --with-bar options
 - Use a consistent separator character for multi-word options,
preferably the underscore _, like cert_file or cups_print_backend
 - Try to avoid automatic feature detection; this makes it harder for
distributors and continuous integration systems to identify the
dependencies needed to build your project
 - Do not add "enable debug" options to inject pre-processor symbols
into the build, or control the presence of debugging messages; you
should use Meson's own buildtype option
 - Do not add "enable -Werror" options to make warnings fail the
build; you should use Meson's own --werror build option
```

It would be good if maintainers that are in the process of porting to
Meson would follow these guidelines; for projects already ported, it
would be good to file bugs.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele

[0]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/GnomeGoals/MesonPorting

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