[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] New build system

Jean-Baptiste Kempf jb at videolan.org
Fri Jun 15 01:45:53 EEST 2018


Hello,

On Thu, 14 Jun 2018, at 18:03, Josh de Kock wrote:
> As such, I'd like to propose adopting a new build system to FFmpeg, 
> namely Meson[1]. There has already been a fair amount of work (not by 

I think this is a great idea.

Custom buildsystem are almost always wrong and/or broken.
Beside autotools (and sometimes CMake), everything is always broken on a system or another.

The FFmpeg configure is an exception, because it's quite good; however it is far from being bug-free, in my experience.
Showing those bugs in this configure got me some rages from old developers, which is why I usually don't mention them. 

It is also quite slow, notably the part where you have nothing shown for a long time, before getting any output. And sometimes you need to repeat over and over, in order to fix that.

But it was not really worse than other solutions.

However, meson is way better than autotools, and wayyy better than CMake. And I will also says that it is better than the configure.
It's also done by people who understand what cross-compilation is, so that's a good point. And they don't want it to be turing-complete, which is great, and avoids creating a monster.

So, +1 from me.

-- 
Jean-Baptiste Kempf -  President
+33 672 704 734


More information about the ffmpeg-devel mailing list