Re: [OE-core] [PATCH 1/3] classes/meson: use ninja explicitly when compiling

["Mathieu Dubois-Briand" <mathieu.dubois-briand@bootlin.com>]

On Tue Jun 30, 2026 at 10:20 AM CEST, Daniel Turull wrote:
> On Tue, 2026-06-30 at 10:13 +0200, Mathieu Dubois-Briand wrote:
>> On Mon Jun 29, 2026 at 4:15 PM CEST, Ross Burton via
>> lists.openembedded.org wrote:
>> > "meson compile" is essentially a glorified wrapper around calling
>> > ninja
>> > that doesn't support all of the options that ninja does, so calling
>> > it
>> > directly means builds are fractionally faster and we get direct
>> > control
>> > over the flags that ninja is passed.
>> > 
>> > A longer rationale can be found in the Gentoo change by Eli
>> > Schwartz
>> > that caused this patch, who is both a Gentoo and Meson developer:
>> > 
>> > 
>> > The only change is that the compile target doesn't support the
>> > optional
>> > convenience target type, but this is rarely used.
>> > 
>> > Signed-off-by: Ross Burton <ross.burton@arm.com>
>> > ---
>> >   meta/classes-recipe/meson.bbclass | 2 +-
>> >   1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>> > 
>> > diff --git a/meta/classes-recipe/meson.bbclass b/meta/classes-
>> > recipe/meson.bbclass
>> > index 9bed293603c..a4643591103 100644
>> > --- a/meta/classes-recipe/meson.bbclass
>> > +++ b/meta/classes-recipe/meson.bbclass
>> > @@ -180,7 +180,7 @@ meson_do_configure() {
>> >   
>> >   do_compile[progress] = "outof:^\[(\d+)/(\d+)\]\s+"
>> >   meson_do_compile() {
>> > -    meson compile -v ${PARALLEL_MAKE} ${MESON_TARGET}
>> > +    ninja --verbose ${PARALLEL_MAKE} ${MESON_TARGET}
>> >   }
>> >   
>> >   meson_do_install() {
>> 
>> Hi Ross, Hi Daniel,
>> 
>> I just note this this patch is conflicting with the one from Daniel
>> [1],
>> as it does use 'MESON_TARGET = "systemd-hwdb:executable"'. Depending
>> on
>> which patch is merged first, the other might have to be rebased and
>> fixed.
>> 
>
> Do you know why is conflicting? the systemd patch doesn't touch
> meson.bbclass
>
> Is is a different format expected for MESON_TARGET content?
>

I do not have all the context, I bet Ross knows better. But you can have
a look at patch 2 in this series (systemd-systemctl-native: update
MESON_TARGET for direct ninja use) for part of the explanation.

-- 
Mathieu Dubois-Briand, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com