Re: How to use Meson (was: [PATCH 00/10] meson: wire up missing HTML documentation])

From: Toon Claes <toon@iotcl.com>
Date: Jan 3, 2025, 07:58 UTC
Message-ID: <874j2gl46v.fsf@iotcl.com>
In-Reply-To: <Z26ygb_4-DP7Ufab@pks.im>

Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I don't really think it makes sense to explicitly point out every
> option that we have. We already document how to discover and set
> options, and from hereon it follows that you can wire up docs by
> running for example `meson setup -Ddocs=man ..`. It's just another
> option, and as such it can be discovered by running `meson configure`.

This is something I wasn't aware of. Because I'm used to the Makefile workflow and I'm not familiar with Meson, I didn't expect it to work like that.

> The benefit of this is that it cannot grow stale like the build options
> in our Makefile. These may or may not have documentation, and may or may
> not be stale. With Meson, every build option is listed explicitly, has
> documentation and is discoverable via `meson configure`.

That's awesome, and I totally I agree we use the benefit of this self-documenting feature of Meson. Again, I didn't know about that. It's more of a me-problem than with your code.

> Yup, you are always expected to set up the top-level source directory,
> not any of the subdirectories. The build instructions are then processed
> linearly in Meson, so variables declared before a call to `subdir()`
> would be accessible in the subdirectory, as well.

With Makefiles I can build individual targets (like `make docs`), or run `make` in the docs/ subdir, is something like that also possible with Meson? Or are you always configuring what to build in `meson configure` and building all that with `meson compile`?

-- 
Toon