Iñigo Martínez's site

It’s been a hard working month, but it has resulted in 7 more meson ports merged:

• bijiben.
• dconf.
• dconf-editor.
• gitg.
• glib-networking.
• gvfs.
• network-manager-applet.

I had been hacking bijiben a bit before the summer, so I knew how its source code was structured. This has paved the way towards merging the meson port. After meson’s merge, its build time has been nicely reduced:

dconf and dconf-editor being small packages, have not presented any major difficulties. On the other hand, this has not allowed meson to shine in build times.

dconf:

dconf-editor:

gitg presents a very pleasant graphical view of the repository status. I have been using it for a while so I wanted to port it to meson.

Just as dconf, it is an application entirely written in Vala, but it is bigger and uses more dependencies. It even builds some shared libraries that are then linked to the application executable. I went through a number of issues that made me doubt if a meson port would be possible, but meson was up to the task and eventually, I was able to fully build gitg. However, one feature is missing, valadoc support, though this could also be solved in the future.

The improvement in the build time is also noticeable:

gvfs and glib-networking have been an excellent teamwork experience. Ondrej and Michael have been very involved, and thanks to their testing, suggestions and improvements, the meson ports have been very successful.

Although glib-networking is a rather small package, meson is able to fully configure, build and install in less than 10 seconds:

(gvfs and network-manager-applet numbers can be found in a previous post)

I hope this trend continues in the future and results in more packages being ported to meson.