[Media Summit] Finalizing the v4l-utils conversion to meson

Laurent Pinchart
2022-08-29T01:34:51Z

Hello,

This mail (and hopefully mail thread) aims to prepare for the Media
Summit 2022 discussion about finalizing the conversion of v4l-utils to
meson.

The original port of v4l-utils to meson was done by Ariel D'Alessandro
(big thanks for that !) and posted to the linux-media mailing list in
April 2022 ([1]). Another RFC version followed ([2]), and the series
then graduated to non-RFC ([3]) with new versions following ([4], [5]
and [6]) until v5 ([7]) in May 2021. I believe it is time to decide if
we want to move to a more modern build system or stay for the foreseable
future in the past (this statement should indicate my opinion on the
subject :-)).

I maintain a branch with the meson integration that I keep rebasing on
top of the v4l-utils master branch. You can find it at

git://linuxtv.org/pinchartl/v4l-utils.git meson

I have also just posted the latest version of the integration patches in
a v6 ([8]).

I have been using the meson integration for about 2 years now, and it
has provided me with a much smoother experience than autoconf, both for
native builds and cross builds. Long gone are the day where I had to
fight autoconf and hack various Makefile.am to comment out pieces of the
tree that would fail to compile properly and wouldn't want to get
disabled through autoconf. These issues are most likely due to
shortcomings in the autoconf usage in v4l-utils than problems with
autoconf and automake themselves, but I quickly gave up on trying to fix
that as meson just worked out of the box as intended.

This being said, I won't pretend that the current implementation would
work perfectly for everybody. I twould thus like to get feedback on how
to move forward.

1. Is there a general agreement that replacing autoconf is a good idea,
provided that any technical issue in the proposed meson implementation
(if any) can be fixed ? Or would it require fighting ophidiophobia and
other non-technical issues that would make it a lost battle from the
start ?

2. What are the technical issues that still need to be solved (if any)
to replace autoconf with meson ?

There's no need to wait for the media summit to start answering those
questions, if we can resolve the issue before meeting face to face,
we'll have more time to discuss other questions :-)

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20200408195611.55421-1-ariel@vanguardiasur.com.ar
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20200429151639.5003-1-ariel@vanguardiasur.com.ar
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20200618133303.28676-1-ariel@vanguardiasur.com.ar
[4] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20200721151434.115651-1-ariel@vanguardiasur.com.ar
[5] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20200806155519.79748-1-ariel@vanguardiasur.com.ar
[6] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20210317172227.620584-1-ariel.dalessandro@collabora.com
[7] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20210512184946.102863-1-ariel.dalessandro@collabora.com
[8] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20220829013327.5791-1-laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com