Hi Patrick,
On Fri, 1 Aug 2025, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
Our commit messages are described so that we first describe the error
and then we describe how this is fixed, and typically they are written
in such a way that they can be read without requiring you to also read
the subject line.
Thanks for the commit message rewrite!
So something like:
When using the Meson build system with an old-enough Git version
that does not yet know the `git ls-files --deduplicate` option one
can observe the following error:
../meson.build:697:19: ERROR: Command `/usr/bin/git -C /home/martin/code/git ls-files --deduplicate '*.h' ':!contrib' ':!compat/inet_ntop.c' ':!compat/inet_pton.c' ':!compat/nedmalloc' ':!compat/obstack.*' ':!compat/poll' ':!compat/regex' ':!sha1collisiondetection' ':!sha1dc' ':!t/unit-tests/clar' ':!t/t[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]*' ':!xdiff'` failed with status 129.
The failing command is used to find all header files in our code
base, which is required for static analysis.
Static analysis is an entirely optional feature that distributors
typically don't care, and about we already know to skip running the
I presume this is a typo, and this should be "typically don't care
about, and we already know to ..." - I've amended your suggestion in this
way locally.
headers_to_check = []
-if git.found() and fs.exists(meson.project_source_root() / '.git')
+if meson.version().version_compare('>=0.62')
+ new_enough_git = git.found() and git.version().version_compare('>=2.31')
+else
+ # On Meson 0.61, we can't check git.version(), so we just have to
+ # assume that the found git is new enough.
+ new_enough_git = git.found()
I'd rather call this `git_supports_file_deduplication`. It's a bit of a
mouthful, but `new_enough_git` raises the question of what it is new
enough for.
Fair enough, good suggestion. Although based on your other suggestion
below, we don't end up needing this part at all.
+endif
+if new_enough_git and fs.exists(meson.project_source_root() / '.git')
foreach header : run_command(git, '-C', meson.project_source_root(), 'ls-files', '--deduplicate', '*.h', third_party_excludes, check: true).stdout().split()
I wonder whether we could avoid the whole version check machinery and
just change this command to `check: false`. If so we accept in case the
command fails, which we can check by calling `.returncode()`.
Thanks, this sounds like a much neater way of avoiding the whole issue!
// Martin
