Is there any reason why Meson doesn't support Makefiles?

[milobanks]

Is there any reason why Meson doesn't support Makefiles (e.g. it goes against a strict design philosophy)? If there's not, and no one's gotten around to it, I'd like to submit a pull request implementing a Makefile backend.

Really don't want to have to switch to CMake just for Makefile support!

Sorry, no idea why there is a duplicate discussion.

[xclaesse]

Let's reply with another question: is there any reason you need makefile and can't use Ninja?

[jpakkane]

Or something like IBM zOS?

[dcbaker]

The only case I’ve run into, is at least one of the BSDs have a requirement that the core OS must be built with their make implementation. But they don’t care at all about ports, so unless clang switches to Meson I don’t think that would be a problem.

[eli-schwartz]

Clang doesn't build with make unless you also run cmake.

I would expect that they ported clang to not need a configure stage since "we know exactly what we need for BSD core", knowing them.

[dcbaker]

I think they run cmake to generate make files, then check those in, actually... At least, that's what they do with autoconf

[eli-schwartz]

How would that even work, since autotools is designed to create standalone Makefiles (plus rules to regenerate them using autotools) whereas cmake creates Makefiles that call back into the cmake binary for the same reason meson has meson --internal (except cmake is much happier to use the cmake program for every goshdarned little thing).