Meson is a modern build system that has seen a rise in adoption and some
version of it is available in almost every platform supported.
Compared to automake, meson has the following advantages:
* Meson provides a significant boost to the build and configuration time
by better exploiting parallelism.
* Meson is subjectively considered to be better in readability.
These merits alone justify experimenting with meson as a way of
improving development time and ergonomics. However, there are some
compromises to ensure the transition goes relatively smooth:
* The system tests currently rely on various files within the source
directory. Changing this requirement is a non-trivial task that can't
be currently justified. Currently the last compiled build directory
writes into the source tree which is in turn used by pytest.
* The minimum version supported has been fixed at 0.61. Increasing this
value will require choosing a baseline of distributions that can
package with meson. On the contrary, there will likely be an attempt
to decrease this value to ensure almost universal support for building
BIND 9 with meson.
This file was initially created for unit testing, but later code was
added to generate the file. The static file should have been removed
from the git repo.
Affected unit tests load testdata from the srcdir. Previously, there
was a kludge that chdir()ed to the tests srcdir, but that get removed
during refactoring. Instead of introducing the kludge again, the paths
were fixed to be properly prefixed with TESTS_DIR as needed.
The unit tests are now using a common base, which means that
lib/dns/tests/ code now has to include lib/isc/include/isc/test.h and
link with lib/isc/test.c and lib/ns/tests has to include both libisc and
libdns parts.
Instead of cross-linking code between the directories, move the
/lib/<foo>/test.c to /tests/<foo>.c and /lib/<foo>/include/<foo>test.h
to /tests/include/tests/<foo>.h and create a single libtest.la
convenience library in /tests/.
At the same time, move the /lib/<foo>/tests/ to /tests/<foo>/ (but keep
it symlinked to the old location) and adjust paths accordingly. In few
places, we are now using absolute paths instead of relative paths,
because the directory level has changed. By moving the directories
under the /tests/ directory, the test-related code is kept in a single
place and we can avoid referencing files between libns->libdns->libisc
which is unhealthy because they live in a separate Makefile-space.
In the future, the /bin/tests/ should be merged to /tests/ and symlink
kept, and the /fuzz/ directory moved to /tests/fuzz/.
