The Meson Build System Is Being Fitted For The X.Org Server

Longtime X.Org developer Eric Anholt who previously worked for Intel and is now working for Broadcom on the open-source VC4 driver stack is working to add the Meson build system support for the xorg-server.

Separately there has been the ongoing discussion about Meson support for libdrm/Mesa with not all developers being turned on by Meson. Now there's this separate Meson effort being led by Eric Anholt for getting the X.Org Server building with it as an alternative to Autotools.

Eric commented on his motivation for getting the Meson build system working for the massive xorg-server code-base, "Meson is a delightful new build system (based around Ninja on Linux) that massively speeds up builds, while also being portable to Windows (unlike autotools generally). If you've ever tried to build the X stack on Raspberry Pi, you know that autotools is painfully slow. It's also been the limiting factor for me in debugging my scripts for CI for the X Server -- something we'd really like to be doing as we hack on glamor or do refactors in the core."

He's still working on getting the Meson support ready for the X.Org Server. More details can be found via this blog post highlighting his latest VC4 development efforts.