Re: Future of autotools

[suzuki toshiya]

Hi,

In the conventional workflow, the source tree of the FreeType2 library
has "./configure", but freetype-demos does not have. Just starting
"make" with existing Makefile under "freetype-demos" carries the
configured values from freetype directory. The meson for the ftinspect
wants to confirm additional libraries, like Qt5 (you can find the
declaration of the dependency in src/ftinspect/meson.build).

If somebody wants to try to make autotools to support the building
of Qt5-based ftinspect, new configure should be added to freetype-demos,
to check the availability of the extra libraries for ftinspect?
Or, such check should be added to existing freetype/configure, even
if libfreetype itself has no dependency with them?

Regards,
mpsuzuki


On 2023/07/11 1:10, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > > If ftinspect and, potentially, other software is not going to be
> > > built via autotools, is there a case to move to another build
> > > system?
>
> Well, yes.  Meson will eventually become the main tool for building
> FreeType, I think (or rather, it definitely won't become CMake as the
> default).  However, cleaning up the build system was/is a GSoC
> project, so nobody else touched it in earnest.  In particular, I am
> not a specialist for Meson; additionally, Meson itself is still quite
> a moving target.
>
> > That's a bit unsatisfactory. Personally I only use the autotools/make
> > to build. Also as far as I know, last I heard there is(was?) a bug of
> > ttdebug being mis-built by meson - it is missing a -DUNIX or something
> > of that sort to control the command buffering.
>
> Yep, https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freetype/freetype-demos/-/issues/24
>
> > I sort of feel like raising it from time to time when the GSoC
> > students are updating the build system "have a look at fixing that
> > too..." but ultimately it sounds like dumping uninteresting/tedious
> > work on young people.
>
> It seems so, unfortunately.
>
> > I think Werner would respond at some point writing "patches welcome"
> > for building ftinspect with autotools :-).
>
> You are reading my mind :-)
>
>
>      Werner