You may remember that I took over Unpaper a number of years ago, as the original author was not interested in maintaining it in the long term. And one of the first things I did was replacing the hand-rolled build system with Autotools, as that made packaging it significantly simpler. Followed by replacing the image decoding with libav first, and more recently FFmpeg.

For various reasons, I have not spent much time on Unpaper over the years I spent in my last bubble. When I joined my current employer I decided that I cared more to get Unpaper back into a project people can contribute to, and less about maintaining the copyright of my contributions, which makes it easier for me to work on it without having to carve out some special time for it.

One of the main requests over on the GitHub project, over these years, has been Windows support. And I did say that Windows 10 is becoming increasingly interesting for Free Software development. So when I was asked to rant on a bit about build systems, which I did over on Twitch, I decided to take a stab at figuring out if Meson (which supports Windows natively), would be a good fit. And I did that using Visual Studio Code and Debian/WSL!

If you haven’t seen the video yet, spoiler alert: I tried, got it working within ten minutes, and it worked like a charm. I’m not kidding you, it pretty much worked at the first attempt (well, the first session, not the first execution), and it made total sense the way it works. You can tell that the folks involved in building Meson (including Gentoo’s own Nirbheek!) knew what they were embarking to do and how to have it fit together. Even small bits like keeping large files support always enabled made me a very happy user.

I have now a branch on GitHub for the Meson build, although it’s incomplete. It doesn’t install any of the docs, and it doesn’t install the man page. Also it doesn’t build nor run the tests. For all of those I created a project to track what needs to be done: move on from the current implementation, it’s 2020!

The test system in the current Autotools version of Unpaper is leveraging the implementation of make check from Automake, together with a C program that compares the expected outputs with what is generated by the newly-built unpaper binary. It also needs to consider a threshold of difference between the two, because precision is not guaranteed, in either direction. This is incredibly fragile and indeed is currently failing for… not sure which reason. Getting a “diff” of the generated versus expected in C is fairly hard and deserves its own project. Instead, relying on Python for instrumenting and running the tests would make it much easier to maintain, as you wouldn’t need to maintain at least three integration points to keep this together.

Something similar is a problem for documentation: right now the documentation is split between some Markdown files, and a single DocBook (XML) file that is converted to a man page with xsltproc. Once the bullet of Python is bit, there’s no reason not to just use ReStructuredText and Sphinx, which already provides integration to generate man pages — and honestly nowadays I feel like the XML version is definitely not a good source because it can’t be read by itself.

What I have not done yet is making sure that the Meson build system allows a Windows build of Unpaper. The reason is relatively simple: while I have started using Visual Studio Code, and clang is available for Windows in the form of a binary, and so is FFmpeg, fitting it all together will probably take me more time, as I’m not used to this development environment. If someone is interested in making sure this works out of the box, I’m definitely happy to review pull requests.

So yeah, I guess the Autotools Mythbuster can provide a seal(ion) of approval to Meson. Great work, folks! Happy to see we have a modern build system available that compromises in the right places instead of being too dogmatic!