Fvwm3, the venerable, solid, configurable, no-nonsense window manager for X, has been updated: fvwm3 1.1.3 has been released. While the version number indicates that this is a minor release, there’s one reason why 1.1.3 is actually a much bigger deal than the version number suggests: it switches the build system from autotools to meson.
Fvwm is very old, and has been using autotools since 1996 (before then it was using handcrafted makefiles), but the release of autotools 2.70, which came eight years after the previous release, the amount of changes in autotools proved to be a major headache for fvwm. Since the amount of work would be considerable, the project decided to look at alternatives to autotools, and after considering CMake and meson, the latter was chosen.
This was chosen primary because X11 itself is transitioning its projects from autotools to meson. Additionally, there has been good help from the wider community around meson’s adoption.
In terms of “speed”, the parallelised nature of not using
↫ Thomas Adammakedoes mean compilation speeds are improved, even on lower-end systems.
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