How to get a project's version from meson.build file?

[rffontenelle]

I have this project's meson.build file and I would like to obtain it's version in programmatic way.

Talking about shell scripting, I could do grep ' version:' meson.build | cut -d\' -f2 when version: x.x.x is not in the same line as the project() function. If in the same, would be little be longer.

Is there a more Meson-way for me to extract this version from meson.build?

[eli-schwartz]

The JSON introspection data has this information, but only once you generate the builddir.

The meson introspect tool has undocumented functionality in that you can pass a file argument pointing to the root meson.build instead of a directory argument pointing to the root builddir. Meson will then do a full AST parse (infinite recursion IIRC, very slow and all that) to do a best effort static analysis of the build files and extract as much information as it can. That can be used to (eventually) query the first line of the root meson.build and extract the projectinfo. :)

[xclaesse]

meson introspect meson.build --projectinfo gives you a json that contains to version. Maybe we should actually document that feature.

[rffontenelle]

meson introspect meson.build --projectinfo | jq .version does the job. Thanks.

[eli-schwartz]

So, like I said above. :)

... but with caveats that it may be quite inefficient about it.

[xclaesse]

IMHO it would make sense to add a subcommand to meson introspect that just parse the initial project() arguments.

[rffontenelle]

Totally agree. Distro package maintainers would love it.

[eli-schwartz]

I am actually trying to think of a good reason for this, but the only one I can think of is something like the wrapdb checks where we very specifically want to compare the version in the tarball url to the version in meson.build and assert that they match.

I don't think that's very interesting to distro package maintainers though.

[rffontenelle]

I would use it for getting pkgver in VCS packages in Arch when the repository has no git tag

[eli-schwartz]

... and I guess you would end up with a revision count incrementing from the root commit, not from the latest version. Sad, but I suppose it does the job.

Seems pretty niche enough to not require a dedicated subcommand though.