[Libosmscout-development] Support meson Build system

[Tim T. <ti...@fr...>]

Hello,

because of being unsatisfied with cmake and because I have read some  
blog articles that state that a number of gnome projects are switching  
from autotools to meson I took a look at meson on Friday, too.

Things look very promising up to now. Concepts are similar to cmake,  
but scripts are far simpler. The current build files already compile  
large parts of the code base under Linux, MSYS2 and OS X (up to  
OSMScout2). I also assume that most of the rest of the code base  
should not be a problem to compile. The build files are rather small  
and simple. Analysis of the build in case of errors is also fine.  
Especially the dependency handling is very elegant and easy. This is  
especially something I do not like at cmake. Builds are also very fast  
(though the meson build does not compile everything yet, so it will  
get slower).

I have not yet looked at how it does perform under Visual Studio or  
XCode but both are in principle supported.

I already have a meson based build running in travis for Linux.

I do not plan to drop cmake. In fact as a Clion user I'm also depended  
on the cmake files. But I'm thinking about dropping the autotools  
based build, if meson can handle all platforms that autotools support  
(and it does look like it does).

Switching to cmake and meson will also make some things simpler. There  
are some aspect in the code based that is based on autotools behaviour  
or requirements that we could drop (protobuf stub handling, Config.h  
come immediately into my mind).

So simple question: Does anybody use the autotools based build? Is  
there a problem, if we drop it? Is anybody using it besides me?

-- 
Gruß...
    Tim