Meson Support Has Landed In The X.Org Server

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 27 April 2017 at 10:41 PM EDT. 5 Comments
X.ORG
Initial Meson build system integration has landed in the xorg-server code-base for testing.

Eric Anholt has been one of the X.Org/Mesa upstream developers that is a fan of the Meson build system. Eric's fondness for Meson come down to being much faster than older Autotools builds, which can be rather critical on limited hardware platforms like the Raspberry Pi where he maintains the VC4 driver stack.

Eric published his Meson build system support for the X.Org Server earlier this week. Initially this support will be complementary to the existing build system, but the hope is to eventually centralize it all on Meson. Eric posted, "This is a work in progress that builds Xvfb, Xephyr, Xwayland, Xnest, and Xdmx so far. The outline of Xquartz/Xwin support is in tree, but hasn't been built yet. The unit tests are also not done. The intent is to build this as a complete replacement for the autotools system, then eventually replace autotools. meson is faster to generate the build, faster to run the bulid, shorter to write the build files in, and less error-prone than autotools."

The support has been merged and will be present in X.Org Server 1.20, which it's released, presumably later this year but so far there has been little in the way of 1.20 release planning.

Adam Jackson made some additional commentary on the mailing list about the addition of another build system.

More X.Org projects are seeing Meson support while also more GNOME components are being ported too over to this build system known for its better performance, greater Windows support, and other modern features.
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