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    Meson build instructions for Tracker · 68b41e39
    Sam Thursfield authored and Sam Thursfield's avatar Sam Thursfield committed
    See <http://mesonbuild.com/> for information about Meson.
    
    Remaining issues:
    
      * There's no `make dist` equivalent. We currently produce release
        tarballs containing the output files of the Vala compiler. We need
        to think through whether we can stop doing that. Shipping the
        generated .c files does make the Vala preprocessor useless so
        it would be good if we can stop.
    
      * The Firefox, Thunderbird, Evolution and Nautilus plugins are not
        built
    
      * https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/671 -- means we can't
        depend on tracker_common_dep in most places and have to manually
        set link_with, include_directories and sources instead.
    
      * https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/1469 -- without this we
        have to install generated Vala headers using a script
    
      * https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/1229 -- means adding
        the #include guard to libtracker-sparql/tracker-generated-no-checks.h
        is a pain
    
      * The test suite has some spurious failures.
    
    Here's a rough speed comparison.
    
    Meson:
            time sh -c 'meson .. --prefix=/opt/tracker-meson -D bash_completion=/opt/tracker-meson/share/bash-completion -Dsystemd_user_services=/opt/tracker-meson/lib/systemd/user -Ddbus_services=/opt/tracker-meson/share/dbus-1/services && ninja-build -j 4 && ninja-build install'
    
            real  1m8.194s
            user  2m16.962s
            sys   0m20.532s
    
    Autotools:
            time sh -c './configure --prefix=/opt/tracker-autotools --with-bash-completion-dir=/opt/tracker-autotools/share/bash-completion --with-session-bus-services-dir=/opt/tracker-autotools/share/dbus-1/services --disable-nautilus-extension && make -j 4 && make install'
    
            real  2m37.750s
            user  4m37.214s
            sys   0m54.806s
    
            Plus 30+ seconds of ./autogen.sh first.
    
    Note that Meson builds may fail if your source tree has generated files
    from an Autotools build in there. If you see errors about duplicate
    definitions, first try cleaning your source tree (use `git clean -dfx`,
    but make sure you commit any work first!!)
    68b41e39