Meson Packaging Guidelines

This document provides best practices for the usage of the Meson build system in Fedora packages. Meson is a build system (similar to automake) which can generate code for other lower-level build systems. For example, it can generate code for ninja. When packaging software which builds using Meson it’s important to use the %meson macros instead of %ninja or other lower-level build system macros directly. The backend used by Meson could change.

Build Dependencies

You MUST add following BuildRequires:

BuildRequires: meson

Available Macros

You will generally make use of these in your specs:

%meson: Defines CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, etc. and calls %__meson with appropriate parameters (--libdir=%{_libdir} and such). You can pass -Doption=value to this macro in order to set options for the buildsystem.
%meson_build: An alias for %ninja_build -C %{_vpath_builddir}.
%meson_install: An alias for %ninja_install -C %{_vpath_builddir}.
%meson_test: An alias for %ninja_test -C %{_vpath_builddir}.

It is rarely necessary (but permissible) to use or alter these:

%__meson: The path to the meson executable

Also see Defining source and build directories.

Example RPM spec file

%global _vpath_srcdir sdk/%{name}/projects/meson

Name:           angelscript
Version:        2.31.1
Release:        1%{?dist}
Summary:        Flexible cross-platform scripting library

License:        zlib
URL:            https://www.angelcode.com/angelscript/
Source:         %{url}sdk/files/%{name}_%{version}.zip

BuildRequires:  meson
BuildRequires:  gcc

%package devel
Summary:        Development libraries and header files for %{name}
Requires:       %{name}%{?_isa} = %{?epoch:%{epoch}:}%{version}-%{release}

%description devel
%{summary}.

%prep
%autosetup -c

%build
%meson
%meson_build

%install
%meson_install

%check
%meson_test

%files
%{_libdir}/lib%{name}.so.*

%files devel
%{_libdir}/lib%{name}.so
%{_includedir}/%{name}.h

Want to help? Learn how to contribute to Fedora Docs ›