Should Python packaging aim for meson as build system (in case of extension modules)?

[FRidh (Frederik Rietdijk)]

@pf_moore

I gave it a try. The setuptools instructions are wrong, you need to remove pyproject.toml as otherwise you get an error that you can’t use --no-use-pep517 because pyproject.toml specifies a build system that isn’t setuptools.

Right, I tested only the Nix builds and forgot we use python setup.py bdist in case of setuptools. Changed the instruction.

@pf_moore

After doing that, the setuptools build fails with an unresolved external PyInit_greetpkg/greet .

I assume this is on Windows. I cannot reproduce it otherwise.

@pf_moore

Looks like Meson can’t find Visual C. I didn’t run vcvars.bat, so I tried again in a Visual Studion 2019 “x86 build tools” prompt, and got:

The Meson instructions not much else aside from using the build tools prompt as you did.
https://mesonbuild.com/Using-with-Visual-Studio.html#using-with-visual-studio

I have no recent experience of using Python on Windows so can’t look into this any further. It’s a pity though it did not work out of the box.

[FRidh (Frederik Rietdijk)]

An effort to migrate scipy to meson is underway:

• RFC: switch to Meson as a build system · Issue #13615 · scipy/scipy · GitHub
• GitHub - rgommers/scipy at meson.

Meson 0.59.0 (to be released) also supports Cython. With PEP 621 it will be trivial to go from a pure-Python package to a package with extension modules using Meson (through mesonpep517). Quite exciting to see!

[FRidh (Frederik Rietdijk)]

@rgommers wrote a blog post about scipy’s move to meson. HN thread.

[FRidh (Frederik Rietdijk)]

meson-python is now the build backend for scipy. https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/16187

[daniele (Daniele Nicolodi)]

This is a great news! I’m looking forward to try meson-python on some projects! Thanks to @rgommers and to everyone involved for the pushing this forward.