Bzip2 uses Meson and Autotools now — and a plea for help

- Tags: bzip2, meson

There is a lot of activity in the bzip2 repository!

Perhaps the most exciting thing is that Dylan Baker made a merge request to add Meson as a build system for bzip2; this is merged now into the master branch.

The current status is this:

  • Both Meson and Autotools are supported.
  • We have CI runs for both build systems.

A plea for help: add CI runners for other platforms!

Do you use *BSD / Windows / Solaris / etc. and know how to make Gitlab's CI work for them?

The only runners we have now for bzip2 are for well-known Linux distros. I would really like to keep bzip2 working on non-Linux platforms. If you know how to make Gitlab CI runners for other systems, please send a merge request!

Why two build systems?

Mainly uncertainty on my part. I haven't used Meson extensively; people tell me that it works better than Autotools out of the box for Windows.

Bzip2 runs on all sorts of ancient systems, and I don't know whether Meson or Autotools will be a better fit for them. Time will tell. Hopefully in the future we can have only a single supported build system for bzip2.