Re: Meson build definition

[Akim Demaille]

Hi Daniele,

> Le 19 déc. 2020 à 20:17, Daniele Nicolodi <daniele@grinta.net> a écrit :
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am working on a project that uses Bison to generate a parser and Meson
> as build system. I would like to include Bison as a subproject [1] in
> particular to make it easier for folks to hack on the project on OSes
> where managing dependencies is not easy (ie Windows).

I believe chocolatey addresses that issue.  And people who want to hack
Bison should certainly be able to use their Unix subsystem.

> For this, I would
> need to have a Meson build definition for Bison too.
> 
> Has anyone worked on building Bison with Meson?

I'm not aware of anything about that.  There were efforts for cmake,
but if it was completed, I have never been told.

> If not, I may enough
> motivation to try to find the time to port the autotools based build
> system to Meson.

You are going to have a hard time with that.  Bison depends on gnulib,
which itself comes with a large suite of Autoconf tests, and is evolving
quite fast.

But I guess you don't aim at addressing all the portability issues
that gnulib fixes, so you certainly can make a build for a modern platform
with much less efforts.

> Would a Meson based build system something that could be included
> upstream? That would make it less likely to bitrot in the near future.

Hosting it is OK, but I will personally spend no time on maintaining
it.  In the past, we hosted the build system for djgpp, so we can host
more.

> Despite many projects moving to Meson, unfortunately, I don't think that
> it yet supports as many niche systems as autotools, thus it may not yet
> be desirable for Bison to move away from autotools

Anyway, this is very unlikely to happen.  Bison belongs to an ecosystem
where the Autotools are the standard.

Cheers!