Re: [Qemu-devel] converting build system to Meson?

[Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>]

On 10/03/2019 17.28, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> writes:
> 
>> Hi all,
>>
>> lately I have been thinking of converting the QEMU build system to
>> Meson.  Meson is a relatively new build system that can replace
>> Autotools or hand-written Makefiles such as QEMU; as a die-hard
>> Autotools fan, I must say that Meson is by far better than anything else
>> that has ever tried to replace Autotools, and actually has the potential
>> to do so.
>>
>> Advantages of Meson that directly matter for QEMU include:
> [...]
>> - ease of distributing a full copy of Meson to support distros that ship
>> an older version (no dependencies apart from Python 3.5).  At 40000
>> lines of Python, Meson is relatively small.
> 
> Meson is licensed under the Apache 2 license.  QEMU as a whole is
> licensed under GPLv2 (and no later versions).  From
> <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2>:
> 
>     This is a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the
>     GNU GPL.
> 
>     Please note that this license is not compatible with GPL version 2,
>     because it has some requirements that are not in that GPL version.
>     These include certain patent termination and indemnification
>     provisions.  The patent termination provision is a good thing, which
>     is why we recommend the Apache 2.0 license for substantial programs
>     over other lax permissive licenses.
> 
> Can we distribute Meson along with QEMU anyway?

Sure, as long as we make it clear that it is a separate executable (with
its own license), and do not link the meson code into the QEMU binary.

 Thomas