Re: RFC: Build system change

[Sam James <sam@gentoo.org>]

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"Christopher J. PeBenito" <pebenito@ieee.org> writes:

> On 9/3/26 5:10 AM, Sam James wrote:
>> "Christopher J. PeBenito" <pebenito@ieee.org> writes:
>>
>>> Back when refpolicy started, every system carried the policy sources
>>> and built its own policy locally. Given that world, *make* was the
>>> obvious choice — ubiquitous, lightweight, and well understood. The
>>> downside is a set of Makefiles that’s hard to read and even harder to
>>> maintain.
>>>
>>> Fast‑forward to today, and no one is building full policies on‑device
>>> anymore. Outside of a few local modules, the main policy is built by
>>> the distro. With that in mind, I’d like to move the main policy build
>>> to a modern system (the headers‑based builds would stay on make).
>>>
>>> I’ve been experimenting with *meson/ninja*, and so far the results
>>> look good. I’d appreciate feedback on two points:
>>>
>>> 1.
>>>
>>>     *Concerns about making this change*
>>
>> We'd lose the ability to quickly run make for a single policy being
>> developed before it moves into proper packaging, I think, but we could
>> keep simple Makefiles around for that case.
>
> When you say single policy, do you mean a full build of
> standard/MLS/MCS or an individual policy module like "make
> modulename.pp"?
>

Ah, sorry, I meant "make modulename.pp" when working on something new.

>
>>> 2.
>>>
>>>     *Which build system we should adopt (I'm definitely not attached to
>>>     meson)*
>> Meson is usually the nicest to deal with as a distribution maintainer.
>>
>> I'm also a Meson contributor. I think Rahul was interested in adding
>> SELinux policy support natively into Meson too.
>>
> Can you clarify what that means? It seems like a very specialized feature.

Not needing custom_targets to build policy files, so benefitting from
proper typing and native Meson objects for it. Meson already has them
for various languages and it welcomes more of them.

I think he had some specific benefits in mind but I'd have to ask him
what they were again.

sam

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