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 commit converts the license handling to adhere to the REUSE
specification. It specifically:
1. Adds used licnses to LICENSES/ directory
2. Add "isc" template for adding the copyright boilerplate
3. Changes all source files to include copyright and SPDX license
header, this includes all the C sources, documentation, zone files,
configuration files. There are notes in the doc/dev/copyrights file
on how to add correct headers to the new files.
4. Handle the rest that can't be modified via .reuse/dep5 file. The
binary (or otherwise unmodifiable) files could have license places
next to them in <foo>.license file, but this would lead to cluttered
repository and most of the files handled in the .reuse/dep5 file are
system test files.