Meson Build:

[Kangie]

• What does this PR do?

This PR is an attempt at finishing off the WIP meson build infrastructure so that we I never have to think about autotools again.

This includes some (very basic) fvwmprompt/fvwmconsole paths based on golang detection. This will probably need to be amended (or just dropped to simplify the build, retaining only the 'modern' path).

Known issues:

• We also don't currently check the golang version. This is probably simply accomplished by calling an external script, I just haven't been bothered - golang 1.14 is 'old' in golang terms, and the build itself should error descriptively if golang is too old. (Any guinea pigs?)

See #89

[Kangie]

Fwiw it builds, links, and installs... On my dev machine. I have not tried a build container yet.

it is also entirely untested, and I don't know the codebase well enough to be sure that everything is covered. I figure good enough for comment now though.

[ThomasAdam]

Thanks, @Kangie

Please just focus on the necessary changes to make meson build with the codebase in the state that it is in.

I'm well aware of the time.h vs says/time.h issue, and the whole RETSIGTYPE return stuff, but I don't want those sorts of changes coming in as part of this work. This change is big enough without those cleanups.

We can do all of that sort of thing later.

[Kangie]

I've moved the commits to the end for now - I'm happy to make a new branch with those commits that I can PR from afterwards, but they're all fixes that IMO could easily fall under the topic of build system modernisation.

As it stands none of the refactor commits materially impact on the autotools build path, we're just configuring for things that no longer exist in code.

Edit: I'm happy to tidy up my commit history down to one or two atomic meson build commits (plus the refactors, etc elsewhere), just let me know what you want that to look like.

[Kangie]

In terms of further tidyup, etc, we do a lot of checks for POSIX headers, etc. Do you want to retain those or can I start stripping that down?

[ThomasAdam]

Hi @Kangie

Thanks again for looking at this.

I think I'd want to do this in stages.

The first approach is to get meson working side-by-side with autotools. When this is eventually merged to main, it isn't replacing autotools at all -- I know there's plenty of platforms out there which can't use meson, but for which people still compile fvwm -- so I want to really assess that before any official switchover is considered, where it's replacing autotools.

What I will say, is that replacement isn't going to remove anything about autotools from the build system -- if someone wishes to use autotools, they can.

So to your question, any cleanups we do have to work for both autotools and meson -- things like RETSIGTYPE and sys/time.h are easy. But we're not at that point yet.

There's a slew of crap from me on the meson branch your PR is based from that deliberately needs squashing together and reworking into decent commits.

Additionally, I'm not sure I've made proper use of meson_options and their 'auto' field, compared with the checks I'm doing in the main/top-level meson.build file -- that really does need looking at as well.

[Kangie]

I was out for most of today, but made decent progress this evening:

• Docs now generate and install
  • There are a few asciidoc errors now, might seek some guidance on that as I haven't touched the source files and I'm pretty sure that they were already being processed in the same way.
• default-config now installs

It looks like there are still a number of outstanding modules. I can add them but thought I'd check if there was a reason that they weren't ported other than the WIP nature of the branch I picked up. :)

asciidoc:

[5/193] Generating doc/fvwm3styles.html with a custom command
asciidoctor: ERROR: fvwm3styles.adoc: line 7: include file not found: /data/development/temp/fvwm3/doc/fvwm3_styles.ad
[6/193] Generating doc/fvwm3commands.html with a custom command
asciidoctor: ERROR: fvwm3commands.adoc: line 7: include file not found: /data/development/temp/fvwm3/doc/fvwm3_commands.ad
[29/193] Generating doc/fvwm3menus.html with a custom command
asciidoctor: ERROR: fvwm3menus.adoc: line 7: include file not found: /data/development/temp/fvwm3/doc/fvwm3_menus.ad
[55/193] Generating doc/fvwm3styles.1 with a custom command
asciidoctor: ERROR: fvwm3styles.adoc: line 7: include file not found: /data/development/temp/fvwm3/doc/fvwm3_styles.ad