Rejuvenating Autoconf

Posted Dec 9, 2020 9:31 UTC (Wed) by sandsmark (guest, #62172)
In reply to: Rejuvenating Autoconf by MrWim
Parent article: Rejuvenating Autoconf

> I've been mulling over creating a project that takes a compile_commands.json as input and generates a meson.build from it. The idea would be to make migrations to meson at least partially automated. It might even be possible to generate multiple different compile_commands.json with build options and generate a meson.build with those same options.

In my experience, tools like that tend to lead to more work in the end with having to clean up everything. It's usually better to at least start those kinds of transformations from the simplest representation (i. e. so you don't have to manually pattern match a bunch of compile options etc.), and even then I end up realizing I should have just started from scratch at the endi.

Even just generating a list of source files to build would lose any kind of grouping or similar (and miss files that are built conditionally).

And FWIW, because KDE has replaced the build system a couple of times there are some scripts that are/were used to create a starting point for porting from e. g. automake to cmake, here's one of them (not sure if it is useful for doing the same conversion to meson for non-KDE projects though): https://invent.kde.org/sdk/kde-dev-scripts/-/blob/master/...