Version 0.64.1-1 is a new release; it follows the upstream release.

The xPack Meson Build is a standalone cross-platform binary distribution of Meson Build.

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

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • GNU/Linux Intel 64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • GNU/Linux Arm 32/64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • Intel Windows 64-bit: Windows 7 with the Universal C Runtime (UCRT), Windows 8, Windows 10
  • Intel macOS 64-bit: 10.13 or later
  • Apple Silicon macOS 64-bit: 11.6 or later

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.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a development dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Add a package.json if not already present

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

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/meson-build@0.64.1-1.1 --verbose

It is also possible to install Meson Build globally, in the user home folder, but this requires xPack aware tools to automatically identify them and manage paths.

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

Uninstall

To remove the links created by xpm in the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/meson-build

To completely remove the package from the central xPack store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/meson-build

Compliance

The xPack Meson Build generally follows the official Meson Build releases.

The current version is based on:

  • Meson Build release 0.64.1 from Nov 23, 2022.

Changes

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

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • none

Embedded Python

To simplify dependency management, this release embeds a Python 3.10.6 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/python3.10
  • lib/python3.10/lib-dynload (the platform dependent files)

The Meson files are located in:

  • lib/python3.10/mesonbuild

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

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 libexec folder (or in the same folder as the executable for Windows).

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.

Please note that previous versions, up to mid-2020, used DT_RUNPATH, which has a priority lower than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and does not tolerate setting it in the environment.

@rpath and @loader_path

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

Documentation

The original documentation is available from:

Build

The binaries for all supported platforms (Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux) 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.

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the How to build page.

CI tests

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

77c0df3aa022a9bf625ae6e99331db3111620001ae7258c24c8b2b0fbe894355
xpack-meson-build-0.64.1-1-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

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xpack-meson-build-0.64.1-1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

e737632bd8df39c4c4b03077d028b1e10e270aa5cfdcaae7b47f6696198f1bb2
xpack-meson-build-0.64.1-1-linux-arm.tar.gz

8e7c0343989af321761360bf7429c3d94080c28ea0ff73b9065d5e7083e54d09
xpack-meson-build-0.64.1-1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

573f898c1a088b3ca385e57d64b2806f4e0e8d50b5790103b8c30cdb09a96ad6
xpack-meson-build-0.64.1-1-linux-x64.tar.gz

622c597382fe163311a0391dda600acceaaf2e6752159cd5aff182d004170a86
xpack-meson-build-0.64.1-1-win32-x64.zip

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit Intel Linux and Intel Windows was dropped in 2022. Support for 32-bit Arm Linux (armv7l) will be preserved for a while, due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems.

Linux minimum requirements

Support for RedHat 7 was dropped in 2022 and the minimum requirement was raised to GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18, Debian 10 and RedHat 8.

Download analytics

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.