Version 0.55.3-2 is a maintenance release of the xPack Meson Build package; it fixes two bugs and updates to the new, more robust, build scripts.

The xPack Meson Build is the xPack distribution of the Meson build system.

There are separate binaries for Windows (Intel 32/64-bit), macOS (Intel 64-bit) and GNU/Linux (Intel 32/64-bit, Arm 32/64-bit).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub releases.

Install

The full details of installing the xPack Meson Build on various platforms are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install Meson Build is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/meson-build from the npmjs.com registry.

To install the latest version available, use:

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/meson-build@latest --verbose

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/meson-build@0.55.3-2.1

Compliance

The xPack Meson Build is based on the official Meson build system, without any changes.

The current version is based on:

  • Meson release 0.55.3 from Sep 11th, 2020.

Bug fixes

  • [#1] - when installing meson as a project dependency, starting it fails on macOS, due to a bug preventing it to follow links; fixed;
  • [#2] - when generating commands in ninja.build that refer to itself, on Linux & macOS the path is not correct, it contains only a folder; fixed.

Enhancements

  • none

Changes

Compared to the upstream version, there are no functional changes.

Embedded Python

To simplify dependency management, this release embeds a Python 3.8.6 instance.

The meson executable is a standard ELF/EXE which includes the Python run-time; the main() function prepares the Python environment and then invokes the Meson main:

  PyRun_SimpleString("from mesonbuild import mesonmain\n");
  PyRun_SimpleString("sys.exit(mesonmain.main())\n");

The Python library is located in the standard location:

  • lib/python3.8
  • lib/python3.8/lib-dynload (the platform dependent files)

The Meson files are located in:

  • lib/python3.8/mesonbuild

To speed up execution, all Python files are compiled and are available only as .pyc.

Known problems

  • none

Shared libraries

On all platforms the packages are standalone, and expect only the standard runtime to be present on the host.

All dependencies that are build as shared libraries are copied locally in the same folder as the executable.

DT_RPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

On GNU/Linux the binaries are adjusted to use a relative path:

$ readelf -d library.so | grep runpath
 0x000000000000001d (RPATH)            Library rpath: [$ORIGIN]

In the GNU ld.so search strategy, the DT_RPATH has the highest priority, higher than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so if this later one is set in the environment, it should not interfere with the xPack binaries.

@executable_path

Similarly, on macOS, the binaries are adjusted with otool to use a relative path.

Documentation

The original documentation is available from:

Supported platforms

Binaries for Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux are provided.

The binaries were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

  • Intel GNU/Linux: all binaries were built with GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 12 Docker container
  • Arm GNU/Linux: all binaries were built with GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 16 Docker container (added in mid-2020)
  • Windows: all binaries were built with mingw-w64 GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 12 Docker container
  • macOS: all binaries were built with GCC 9.3, running in a separate folder on macOS 10.10.5.

Build

The scripts used to build this distribution are in:

  • distro-info/scripts

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the README-MAINTAINER page.

Travis tests

The first set of tests were performed on Travis, by running a simple script to check if the binaries start on a wide range of platforms and distributions:

Tests

TBD

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

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xpack-meson-build-0.55.3-2-linux-arm64.tar.gz

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xpack-meson-build-0.55.3-2-linux-arm.tar.gz

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xpack-meson-build-0.55.3-2-linux-x32.tar.gz

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xpack-meson-build-0.55.3-2-linux-x64.tar.gz

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xpack-meson-build-0.55.3-2-win32-x32.zip

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xpack-meson-build-0.55.3-2-win32-x64.zip

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