Future Direction Strawpoll <Please rename me>

[LebedevRI]

Note

Please refrain from bikeshedding in this issue.

cc @TurboGit, i'm not sure who else.

I'd like to disscuss two interconnected things.

While i expected to first hook up RS.RS into vkdt,
that program does not do "fall back to other loader
if the first one fails", so it's a little pointless
to integrate RS.RS into vkdt right now.

But at the same time, not having it integrated
at least somewhere is not an ideal solution either.
So i'm wondering if i could put it into darktable itself.
Are there any general objections on that?

CMake does not support Rust's cargo. But Meson does.
And Meson seems to be a kind-of better buildsystem nowadays.
While i'm sure that i will manage to get it working with CMake,
i'm wondering what are y'all thoughts on switching over to Meson.

Thanks!

[TurboGit]

Hi Roman!

1. Can you please tell me more about RS.RS. That's the first time I heard about it. What this will bring to Darktable?

2. I'm not fan of CMake but we've invested quite a lot on it and most devs have some experience with it. I won't be the one to push on this without a consensus among the main devs. I'm for one to know next to nothing about Meson :) A lot of questions come to mind:

• Do we have an idea about the work/time needed for the switch?
• Is that (well) supported on Windows (MSYS2) ?
• Is that supported on macOS? As far as I understand there is two build systems on macOS, we need to be sure if both are properly supported.
• Who are the Darktable devs knowing Meson? @dterrahe @jenshannoschwalm @wpferguson @kmilos @zisoft @ralfbrown @dtorop

I'm sure more questions will be raised but let's see where we stand with those.

[wpferguson]

I was picking around in the GIMP repository will working on #20288 and noticed that they use meson as their build system. As for me I didn't even know it was a build system until yesterday

[zisoft]

• Is that supported on macOS? As far as I understand there is two build systems on macOS, we need to be sure if both are properly supported.

Yes, Meson is supported on macOS. We have two package managers to maintain the dependencies (Homebrew or MacPorts), both do not influence the build process.

[kmilos]

FWIW, LibRaw (nor the community) doesn't supply Meson build scripts like we leveraged the CMake ones.

MSYS2 does ship Meson as well, but also don't know how to package all the DLL dependencies like we do w/ CPack today - should be doable if GIMP does it...

[LebedevRI]

Hi Roman!

1. Can you please tell me more about RS.RS. That's the first time I heard about it. What this will bring to Darktable?

Um :) RawSpeed . RuSt, https://github.com/darktable-org/rawspeed.rs
There's also this previous disscussion: darktable-org/rawspeed#709

[LebedevRI]

Regarding building external 3-rd party projects as part of darktable,
that come with CMake build system, that's a great question.
i'm not really familiar with Meson, but i have a weak hope that
Meson could just consume CMake projects internally,
via https://mesonbuild.com/CMake-module.html.

But yeah, i guess maybe let's hold off on the Meson thing,
since it is known how to coerce CMake into building
a non-CMake subproject, but i'm not 100% sure about vice-versa.

[TurboGit]

Um :) RawSpeed . RuSt, https://github.com/darktable-org/rawspeed.rs

I was pretty sure that one RS was for RawSpeed :) Didn't remember the second for Rust :)

[jenshannoschwalm]

No opinion here. I just take what others provide :-)

[ralfbrown]

Like Bill, if you'd asked me yesterday, I would have had no idea what Meson is (though I think I've heard it mentioned before).

[github-actions]

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