[libvirt PATCH 000/351] port libvirt to Meson build system

[Peter Krempa]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 10:33:52 +0200, Pavel Hrdina wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 10:09:42AM +0200, Peter Krempa wrote:

[...]

> 
> Here I disagree, it also means that compilation should not fail. We do
> comments all the time to patch series that every single commit should
> compile correctly on it's own within the series.

Doing a 'return 0' is not compiling code correctly. The idea of
requirements to bulild cleanly is that you can test the code.

In this case we need to observe it from a different angle though.

In reality an incomplete build is a failed build regardless of what the
return value of the build system is. And that is important here. The
main reason for the build system is to build everything so the only
success is when everything is built.

If you don't have the resulting binary it's impossible to test the code
or do anything else.

What would be even worse is to get a compiled binary that e.g. doesn't
have the dependencies installed (such as RNG schemas, cpu XML docs and
such) and fails in magic ways. At that point you can't be sure whether
it's the bug you are trying to locate or just plainly broken build
which the build system lied to you that it's complete.