Re: [PATCH] meson: make GIT_HTML_PATH configurable

[Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2025 at 06:41:06AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> "D. Ben Knoble" <ben.knoble+github@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Makefile-based builds can configure Git's internal HTML_PATH by defining
> > htmldir, which is useful for packagers that put documentation in
> > different locations. Gentoo, for example, uses version-suffixed
> > directories like ${prefix}/share/doc/git-2.51 and puts the HTML
> > documentation in an 'html' subdirectory of the same.
> >
> > Propagate the same configuration knob to Meson-based builds so that
> > "git --html-path" on such systems can be configured to output the
> > correct directory.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: D. Ben Knoble <ben.knoble+github@gmail.com>
> > ---
> 
> Makes sense (a more meson-minded person needs to double check my
> knee-jerk reaction, though).  It is surprising that 
> 
>     $ git grep "dir', " meson_options.txt
>     meson_options.txt:option('perllibdir', type: 'string', value: '',
> 
> has only a single hit (now two), though.  I thought we have a lot
> more flexibility in our build process.

That was a concious decision when I introduced Meson. The discussion
back then was whether most of the build options that we have are even
used anywhere, so we eventually agreed to only add options on an
as-needed basis.

> I am also a bit surprised that these things are of type 'string'; I
> somehow was expecting that more modern build system would offer
> richer (relative to Makefile, that is) types like 'filename' or
> 'path'.

Meson provides tools to handle paths nicely [1], but it ultimately ends
up using strings indeed.

[1]: https://mesonbuild.com/Fs-module.html

Patrick