Drop autoconf?

[jlindgren90]

Hey @radioactiveman, I recently tried an autoconf build and encountered the same issue I see you already documented here:
https://audacious-media-player.org/problems - "AM_ICONV and AM_GNU_GETTEXT macros are not found with autogen.sh"

Should we just drop autoconf build support now? meson has been recommended since version 4.4 (June 2024) and I think meson builds should work fine even on e.g. Debian oldstable. I can iron out any issues on Windows before the next release.

[mschwendt]

With the newer gettext you first need to run "autopoint -f", then "autoreconf" works. According to the devs that is intentional.

[jlindgren90]

autopoint -f copies dozens of files (mostly m4) into the worktree. Are we expected to commit these? .gitignore them?

I don't really like it either way. Fact is, autotools is an ancient build system that we only ever half-used. At this point it is still supported mainly because of inertia. If upstream is intentionally making breaking changes, then I don't see any reason to keep it around any longer.

[jlindgren90]

Background: long ago, Audacious used to carry downstream copies of various m4 files, which were continually getting out-of-date. Since commit 8d6a9f8 back in 2011, we have not done so. I'd rather not go back.

[mschwendt]

Yeah, many files must be copied, and more is done at make time compared with configure time since gettext 0.24(?):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2366708#c11

[jlindgren90]

Looking closer, it appears that autopoint -f copies more files than are really necessary (including m4 files from autoconf itself, I guess?) If we just vendor what's installed under /usr/share/gettext/m4 then it's 11 files which is (slightly) more reasonable. That might be the best solution for now.

[radioactiveman]

I am in favor of just dropping autoconf support entirely. That was always the idea when we declared it as deprecated in 2024. Only the when was not clear yet.

All common distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, Gentoo, FreeBSD as well as HomeBrew (macOS) have switched to Meson meanwhile to build Audacious. No bugs have been reported by package maintainers so it should be mature enough. And as you said John, even Debian oldstable and Ubuntu 20.04 support it out of the box. So making the cut now with Audacious 4.6 is a good idea. 👍

The only thing missing for Windows should be setting the subsystem which is easy to fix. And the build instructions (win32/notes.html) must be updated accordingly. Edit: I forgot the NSIS installer but do not know how you created it before with the audacious.nsi file.

[jlindgren90]

autoconf is used on the Win32 build for a few random things, like setting the version number in the README. Shouldn't be a big deal to replicate (could use e.g. a sed script).

[radioactiveman]

I have implemented the remaining Meson bits for the Windows build and removed autoconf/autotools support now.

Let me know if something is not working on Windows.

[radioactiveman]

Do you agree John to have Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / Debian oldstable as baseline for Audacious 4.6?

It allows us to bump the Qt requirements to 5.12. QDateTime::fromSecsSinceEpoch() used for the new file creation/modification dates requires 5.8 for example. And we have quite a few other version checks we then can get rid of.

[jlindgren90]

Yes, that seems fine