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twelveeighty

Member

Registered: 2011-09-04

Posts: 1,448

Considerations for adding or dropping ninja from a build process

I noticed that for neovim-qt in [extra] the PKGBUILD drops ninja from the build in the Jan 8, 2025 update. It's against the same upstream source, so it wasn't an upstream change. I'm a newbie with all the various build types (cmake, meson, ninja) so can someone with more experience enlighten me? Is it purely a simplification: one less (make) dependency, personal choice, or some other reason I'm not aware of?

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 14,912

Re: Considerations for adding or dropping ninja from a build process

Only the person that made the change can answer that.

Form my personal experience : ninja is not a build system itself, it needs something else to create the files it needs to work .
Meson has ninja as default and does support other methods .

Cmake has unix files as default (meant to be used with make) and as far as I know has no plans to change the default .
It supports more alternatives then meson.

ninja is faster then make but also stresses the build system resources on memory and cores/threads .
On a dedicated build server that is usually not a problem but on a system that has other tasks then building ninja can cause severe issues for those other tasks.

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky