Post #33186

2025-11-17 22:50 UTC

I am probably old fashioned, but running into an open source commandline tool written in C that "requires" meson and ninja to build, in order to accomplish the equivalent of... $ gcc -o tool main.c -lone -ltwo ...seems like maybe just a bit of overkill to me. (In case anyone was curious, I did not end up installing ninja and meson in order to build this tool.) #OldManYellingAtCloud

Replies (7)

@trouble@masto.ai 2025-11-17 22:58

@swetland It depends on whether you are talking about compiling for local use or cross compiling hermetically/reproducibly for use on another machine? The former is easy. The latter...depends on how good you want it. As a full time build and release engineer, there's a lot of middle ground to half-ass it and have it mostly work. Truly hermetic, while retaining performance, is not conceptually difficult, but just like writing threads, it's very exacting.

Open ##1554011
@ChuckMcManis@chaos.social 2025-11-17 23:03

@swetland If I could boost this a thousand times I would. I dislike Meson with the heat of a thousand suns, not because it doesn't do what it sets out to do, rather it does things that can be done so much more easily and cleanly and have been for DECADES.

Open ##1554015
@elebertus@mastodon.social 2025-11-17 23:12

@swetland frankly I’m just curious what the tool is. I likely would have done the same thing you did if I was just trying to get it to run on my machine. Or blast it into a container I suppose. Still seems silly.

Open ##1554019
@kbob@chaos.social 2025-11-18 00:12

@swetland You learned to compute when tools were simple enough it was feasible to learn how they really worked. If you didn't have that background, your concept of "simpler" or "more basic" would be much less grounded. (I feel the same way and shake my head at the same things.)

Open ##1554024
@cda@macaw.social 2025-11-18 00:23

@swetland Yeah, there is a lot of this kind of thing that strikes me as rather adjacent to PHK's "lost in the bazaar" ... containers and build-systems show up as a kind of "best practices" default in projects where an autoconf-less Makefile or shell script would actually be better in nearly every way. A lot of CI/CD stuff is like this too.

Open ##1554031
@dcnick3@social.treehouse.systems 2025-11-18 05:34

@swetland At least it's not autotools

Open ##1554036
@f4grx@chaos.social 2025-12-05 11:20

@swetland let me yell with you. Such tools are a big "fuck no" over here. I consider these tools "closed source by buid system clogging" . or something.

Open ##1554038