Mesa Developers Move Closer To Dropping Autotools Build System In Favor Of Meson

Mesa developers have been discussing on and off in recent months about dropping their Autotools build system support considering there is also the SCons build support, Android build system support, and most notably is the increasingly mature Meson build system coverage.

Particularly with more Mesa packagers/users moving to the Meson build system for its speedier build times with Ninja, developers have been wanting to get rid of GNU Autotools for having one less build system to maintain.

Intel's Eric Engestrom on Monday posted a patch to drop Autotools. In stripping out Autotools, Mesa is lightened up by more than 200 files that amount to more than 14,000 lines of build system specific bits.

But whether Autotools will be dropped ahead of the upcoming Mesa 19.0 release/branching remains to be seen. There still is some disagreement when the Autotools support will be removed with some wanting instead to see Meson 0.49 released and that version more widely deployed/packaged by distributions before nuking Autotools. This next Meson release will work better with Mesa for cases of wanting to build against non-default LLVM versions.

Anyhow it's looking like not too further out in 2019 and we'll see Mesa's Autotools support removed in favor of Meson.