How to build & install libvips only with meson?

[der-eismann]

We have a project that depends on the vips shared library only, so we don't want to build the tools or c++ stuff to not waste energy. At the moment we checkout the project and then do

./configure  ...
cd libvips && make -j8 && make DESTDIR=/ install

However with meson this seems much more complicated. I now have this setup:

meson setup build
meson compile libvips/vips -C build && \
meson compile libvips/vips-heif -C build && \
meson compile libvips/vips-jxl -C build && \
meson install -C build --no-rebuild

However if I do this the install step complains that some parts that were not built can't be found, e.g.

ERROR: File 'cplusplus/libvips-cpp.so.42.15.3' could not be found

When I use meson install --tags=runtime it also still wants to install the C++ stuff. Any hints how to achieve the previous behavior? Could we maybe expand meson with some custom tags?

[jcupitt]

Hi @der-eismann,

Sure, a PR with some extra options would be useful. Have a look at the -Dexamples option if you need a guide.

There are some now -- have a look in meson_options.txt. You could build with (for example):

meson setup build --prefix ~/vips \
    -Ddeprecated=false \
    -Dexamples=false \
    -Dintrospection=false \
    -Danalyze=false \
    -Dradiance=false \
    -Dppm=false 

Then:

meson compile -C build
meson install -C build

[jcupitt]

... I added a -Dcplusplus=false option to disable build of the C++ API: 821e216

Disabling the tools would be harder: you'd need to stop most of the tests from running too.

[eli-schwartz]

You could add the tools as depends: [tools, that, are, needed] to the tests that need them. When the tools are disabled, define them as a disabler() instead -- then the tests that depend on those tools end up disabled as well.