X.Org package wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle announced today the release of imake 1.0.11, the newest version of this utility that 20+ years ago was used extensively as part of the X Window System build process for generating Makefiles from a template. With this first imake point release in two years, imake itself can now be built via Meson and there is now support for RISC-V and LoongArch architectures.
Over the past twenty years the still-active X11 / X Window System code has transitioned largely over to GNU Autoconf and Automake while in more recent years seeing increased Meson adoption too. But for any old X code remnants not yet adapted or wanting to build older versions of said software, imake is still needed
Maybe it’s just I’m a relative noob to build systems, but gosh, do I love Meson.
The documentation’s pretty okay - not perfect, but better than cmake - and it feels like I can actually learn it by example through looking at other projects’ setups.
I can live with using other build systems for other projects, but for personal projects, I’ll always choose Meson. I’ll always push for it if a project I’m working on needs to choose a build system.
The impression that I got from this article is that even the author of imake feels the same way, and is only maintaining it out of consideration for legacy software still using it.