Subject: Re: [PATCH v11 25/26] meson: fix conflicts with in-flight topics

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2024 21:03:05 +0900

Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> writes:

>> I also had to wonder if we can share the common list of files and
>> have both make and meson worlds include them from the same source,
>> but if the eventual goal is to migrate into a single system, it is
>> not all that great an idea.  After giving up on one of the systems,
>> we would not want to keep a system where we keep a list of source
>> files in a separate file (possibly in a separate syntax), which is
>> not how either world would normally work.
>
> That would be great indeed,

Well, what I wanted to say is that it is not a good idea, especially
if our eventual goal were to ditch either one of these systems, so
we are on the same page.

After ps/build~1 graduates to 'master', it may be sufficient to add
a Makefile target that runs the check script you sent earlier to
this thread as a part of "make test".  That way, those developers
who work primarily with "make" can minimally install "meson" and do
nothing else and we make sure that their changes in the "make" world
would not make "meson" (and possibly "cmake") world stale.

Those who do not have "meson" may skip the check during their "make
test" without any negative (perhaps other than a message to nag them
to install "meson") consequences, or even a hard failure may be
acceptable, if the necessary adjustment is trivial (like "I added a
command in builtin/ and listed it in Makefile---add it to this list
in meson.build file").  After all, we are talking about developers
who are willing to run "make test", so requiring them to have a
build system if they want to develop for this project may not be too
bad.  I dunno.

> I guess we'll see over time how much of a problem it is to keep build
> systems in sync. Proper tooling is a first step to make things a bit
> less tedious, but if this still proves to be too painful I'll have a
> look for how to further automate things.

With very small set of topics between 'next' and 'seen', we know
that we already needed 4 or 5 merge-fix changes.  The authors of
these topics would have wanted all the help making sure their
updates are good in both "make" and "meson" world, if they started
their topic in a not-so-distant future where ps/build~1 has
graduated to 'master'.

Thanks.