Creating releases
In addition to development, almost all projects provide periodical
source releases. These are standalone packages (usually either in
tar or zip format) of the source code. They do not contain any
revision control metadata, only the source code. Meson provides
a simple way of generating these, with the meson dist
command.
Meson provides a simple way of generating these. It consists of a single command (available since 0.52.0):
meson dist
or alternatively (on older Meson versions with ninja
backend):
ninja dist
This creates a file called projectname-version.tar.xz
in the build
tree subdirectory meson-dist
. This archive contains the full
contents of the latest commit in revision control including all the
submodules (recursively). All revision control metadata is removed.
Meson then takes this archive and tests that it works by doing a full
compile
+ test
+ install
cycle. If all these pass, Meson will
then create a SHA-256
checksum file next to the archive.
Autotools dist VS Meson dist
Meson behaviour is different from Autotools. The Autotools "dist" target packages up the current source tree. Meson packages the latest revision control commit. The reason for this is that it prevents developers from doing accidental releases where the distributed archive does not match any commit in revision control (especially the one tagged for the release).
Include subprojects in your release
The meson dist
command has --include-subprojects
command line
option. When enabled, the source tree of all subprojects used by the
current build will also be included in the final tarball. This is
useful to distribute self contained tarball that can be built offline
(i.e. --wrap-mode=nodownload
).
Skip build and test with --no-tests
The meson dist
command has a --no-tests
option to skip build and
tests steps of generated packages. It can be used to not waste time
for example when done in CI that already does its own testing.
So with --no-tests
you can tell Meson "Do not build and test generated
packages.".
Use --allow-dirty
to override error when git repository contains uncommitted changes
Since 0.62.0 Instead of emitting a warning when a repository contains
uncommitted changes, Meson will produce an error message notifying the
user and immediately exit. If --allow-dirty
is given as an option to
meson dist
, a warning will be emitted instead and Meson will proceed
as usual.
Release a subproject separately
Since 0.57.0 the meson dist
command can now create a distribution tarball
for a subproject in the same git repository as the main project. This can be
useful if parts of the project (e.g. libraries) can be built and distributed
separately. In that case they can be moved into subprojects/mysub
and running
meson dist
in that directory will now create a tarball containing only the
source code from that subdir and not the rest of the main project or other
subprojects.
For example:
git clone https://github.com/myproject
cd myproject/subprojects/mysubproject
meson setup builddir
meson dist -C builddir
This produces builddir/meson-dist/mysubproject-1.0.tar.xz
tarball.
Cement a version obtained from VCS
Since 1.4.0 the meson dist
command enables rewriting the build
configuration of the distribution tarball. This is needed when the
configuration depends on metadata from revision control such as in the
following example.
meson.build
:
project('tig', 'c',
version : run_command('version.sh', 'get-vcs').stdout.strip())
meson.add_dist_script('version.sh', 'set-dist', meson.project_version())
version.sh
:
#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = "get-vcs" ]; then
git -C "$MESON_SOURCE_ROOT" describe --always --dirty
elif [ "$1" = "set-dist" ]; then
$MESONREWRITE --sourcedir="$MESON_PROJECT_DIST_ROOT" kwargs set project / version "$2"
else
exit 1
fi
The results of the search are