Meson 0.47 changes the way to handle external dependencies on shared
libraries significantly. Instead of just putting arguments provided by
pkg-config on the linker command line, meson tries to convert -L and -l
arguments into absolute paths to .so files by itself. This should make
library handling more reliable because an absolute path is less likely
to go wrong than an ordered list of search paths. However, due to the
big change, a few regressions is still introduced, causing modules to
fail to build in a JHBuild environment from time to time.

Ideally regressions should be fixed in a few weeks and made available in
subsequent releases. Unfortunately, I can't get my patches merged
upstream in one year, and I have to remember to patch meson manually
every time JHBuild updates meson. This is annoying because there are
always modules failing to build because of these known bugs if I forget
to patch it. Therefore, I think it is time to submit these patches to
JHBuild, so it can be applied automatically.

The above patches have been added to FreeBSD ports since Meson 0.48.
The CI runner currently used to test GLib on FreeBSD also uses it.
Given that they has been used for one year without issues, it should be
safe to use them to JHBuild as well.

https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/4270
https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/4324

https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/4271
https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/4325

Meson 0.52 introduces a new library path regression. It now tries to add
-Wl,-rpath-link when pkg-config --static returns more -L arguments than
the default pkg-config call. The intention is to tell GNU ld.bfd where
it can find dependencies of shared libraries, but the implementation
does it in a wrong order and creates more undefined reference errors
than it fixes in JHBuild environments. Since JHBuild always does native
builds and LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set, -Wl,-rpath-link arguments pointing to
installation prefixes are unnecessary in JHBuild environments.
Therefore, it is safe to work around the issue by reverting the commit
introducing the feature temporarily.

https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/5647
https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/6027
https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/6031

Meson 0.52 also changes the way to handle static libraries. It is known
to break builds for dconf and gnome-builder. Unfortunately, these two
projects don't fix them in a week and we are going to update meson
without fixing them first. We backport a patch to remove duplicates from
the linker command line to resolve 'argument list too long' error when
building gnome-builder. This doesn't fix the build failure, but it
should make it easier to debug the link_whole issue.

https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/5936
https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/6030
dconf#59
gnome-builder#1057