[dpdk-dev] Meson Minimum Version

[Bruce Richardson]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 12:19:33PM +0300, Dmitry Kozlyuk wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Sep 2020 09:41:22 +0100, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 09:31:53AM +0200, Morten Brørup wrote:
> > > > From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Bruce Richardson
> [snip]
> > > In short, my primary concern is: What could realistically go wrong if the required version of Meson is buggy?
> > > 
> > > Bruce, you have worked for quite a while with Meson/Ninja by now, so perhaps you can assess this risk based on your experience.
> > >   
> > I'd say the risk in this case is small, especially since I see that 0.56 of
> > meson is well under way for development and may well be released before
> > DPDK 20.11. Generally backwards compatibilty of meson is excellent as they
> > have comprehensive test suite for all features.
> >
> > Rather than any bugginess, my concern was purely requiring people to update
> > meson using "pip3", but I suppose that's not really a big deal, and when
> > using pip update it defaults to just updating the copy for the local user,
> > not system-wide.
> 
> Speaking for Windows, at least twice this year there were incompatibilities
> between _minor_ versions of Meson, due to admitted bugs in Meson. However,
> IMO this is an argument for using just _exact_ version, not necessarily an old
> one. Pip facilitates this better than OS package manager, because developer
> controls the version and can easily switch, regardless of distro updates.
> Thus, John's upgrade suggestion and transition to pip both look reasonable.
> 

Seems that meson must be a bit more fragile on windows then, which is a
pity (and perhaps their regression tests aren't as good as I thought).
On Linux, since version 0.40 I think only one version, 0.47.0, caused an
issue for us, which was fixed in 0.47.1.
However, having a recommended version to use can work too.