The meson build switched to generating the file grammars and using meson
to build the manpages/ARM. This is because meson doesn't work well when
writing files outside the build directory.
However, this has been suboptimal when someone only wants to build the
documentation (like RTD). Sphinx can now be used outside meson like it
was with autoconf.
Grammars are now updated by the developer with CI checking if one is
needed or not, like clang-format.
Meson is a modern build system that has seen a rise in adoption and some
version of it is available in almost every platform supported.
Compared to automake, meson has the following advantages:
* Meson provides a significant boost to the build and configuration time
by better exploiting parallelism.
* Meson is subjectively considered to be better in readability.
These merits alone justify experimenting with meson as a way of
improving development time and ergonomics. However, there are some
compromises to ensure the transition goes relatively smooth:
* The system tests currently rely on various files within the source
directory. Changing this requirement is a non-trivial task that can't
be currently justified. Currently the last compiled build directory
writes into the source tree which is in turn used by pytest.
* The minimum version supported has been fixed at 0.61. Increasing this
value will require choosing a baseline of distributions that can
package with meson. On the contrary, there will likely be an attempt
to decrease this value to ensure almost universal support for building
BIND 9 with meson.
New directive .. statementlist:: generates table of statements in a
the given domain (named.conf or rndc.conf). The table contains link to
definition, short description, and also list of tags.
Short description and tags have to be provided by user using optional
parameters. E.g.:
.. statement:: max-cache-size
:tags: resolver, cache
:short: Short description
.. statementlist:: is currently not parametrized.
This modification is based on Sphinx "tutorial" extension "TODO".
The main trick is to use placeholder node for .. statementlist:: and
replace it with table at later stage, when all source files were
processed and all cross-references can be resolved.
Beware, some details in Sphinx docs are not up-to-date, it's better
to read Sphinx and docutil sources.
The extension provides a "Sphinx domain factory". Each new Sphinx domain
defines a namespace for configuration statements so named.conf and
rndc.conf do not clash. Currently the Sphinx domains are instantiated
twice and resuling domains are named "namedconf" and "rndcconf".
This commit adds a single new directive:
.. statement:: max-cache-size
It is namespaced like this:
.. namedconf:statement:: max-cache-size
This directive generates a new anchor for configuration statement and it
can be referenced like :any:`max-cache-size` (if the identifier is
unique), or more specific :namedconf:ref:`max-cache-size`.
It is based on Sphinx "tutorial" extension "recipe".
Beware, some details in Sphinx docs are not up-to-date, it's better
to read Sphinx and docutil sources.
