The util/meson-dist-package.sh script hardcodes the date it is run on
into the man pages it creates in the dist tarball. This causes pkgdiff
to report discrepancies if the util/release-tarball-comparison.sh script
is run on a different day than the one the dist tarball was generated
on.
Fix by using the exact same solution as in BIND 9.20: generating the man
page stubs with a @RELEASE_DATE@ placeholder instead of a specific date
and only replacing that placeholder with a specific date during the
build process.
Building and installing from a git release installed all manpages
unconditionally even if binaries like dnstap-read were disabled and not
built.
Now the manpage configuration checks for such cases and also cleans up
remaining artifacts and unnecessary pages if the build directory is
reconfigured.
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.
