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xPack Meson Build v0.56.2-2 released

· 3 min read
Liviu Ionescu (ilg)
Liviu Ionescu (ilg)

Version 0.56.2-2 is a maintenance release of the xPack Meson Build package, intended to fix the macOS starting bug.

The xPack Meson Build is the xPack distribution of the Meson build system.

There are binaries for x64 Windows, macOS (Intel 64-bit) and GNU/Linux (Intel 32/64-bit, Arm 32/64-bit).

Raspberry Pi

The main targets for the GNU/Linux Arm binaries are the Raspberry Pi class devices (armv7l and aarch64; armv6 is not supported).

Download​

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Install​

The full details of installing the xPack Meson Build on various platforms are presented in the Install Guide.

Compliance​

The xPack Meson Build is based on the official Meson build system, without any changes.

The current version is based on:

  • Meson release 0.56.2 from Jan 10th, 2021.

Bug fixes​

  • [#3] on macOS, the binary did not identify the executable absolute path correctly and failed to start; the logic was changed to use proc_pidpath() and the bug was fixed.

Enhancements​

  • none

Changes​

Compared to the upstream version, there are no functional changes.

Embedded Python​

To simplify dependency management, this release embeds a Python 3.8.6 instance.

The meson executable is a standard ELF/EXE which includes the Python run-time; the main() function prepares the Python environment and then invokes the Meson main:

  PyRun_SimpleString("from mesonbuild import mesonmain\n");
  PyRun_SimpleString("sys.exit(mesonmain.main())\n");

The Python library is located in the standard location:

  • lib/python3.8
  • lib/python3.8/lib-dynload (the platform dependent files)

The Meson files are located in:

  • lib/python3.8/mesonbuild

To speed up execution, all Python files are compiled and are available only as .pyc.

Known problems​

  • none

Documentation​

The original documentation is available from:

Supported platforms​

Binaries for Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux are provided.

The binaries were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

  • x86/x64 GNU/Linux: all binaries were built with GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 12 Docker container
  • arm64/arm GNU/Linux: all binaries were built with GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 16 Docker container (added in mid-2020)
  • x86/x64 Windows: all binaries were built with mingw-w64 GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 12 Docker container
  • x64 macOS: all binaries were built with GCC 9.3, running in a separate folder on macOS 10.10.5.

Build​

The scripts used to build this distribution are in:

  • distro-info/scripts

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the README-MAINTAINER page.

Travis tests​

The first set of tests were performed on Travis, by running a simple script to check if the binaries start on a wide range of platforms and distributions:

Tests​

TBD

Checksums​

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

61739c5dc93d61205cc40a49d604caebad71c9889ea356fa15d022831385c155
xpack-meson-build-0.56.2-2-darwin-x64.tar.gz

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xpack-meson-build-0.56.2-2-linux-arm64.tar.gz

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xpack-meson-build-0.56.2-2-linux-arm.tar.gz

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xpack-meson-build-0.56.2-2-linux-ia32.tar.gz

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xpack-meson-build-0.56.2-2-linux-x64.tar.gz

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xpack-meson-build-0.56.2-2-win32-ia32.zip

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xpack-meson-build-0.56.2-2-win32-x64.zip

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Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.