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.
The files configure.ac and version are already up to date.
Updated CHANGES with 9.17.0 release line.
Fixed CHANGES by adding GitLab reference to entry 5357 and fix
grammar mistakes.
Add missing /util/check-make-install.in to .gitattributes.
The lib/*/api are already updated to match the new ranges.
I listed two new features under BIND 9.17 features that to me
seemed noteworthy.
The release notes look good to me.
Convert the logic (currently present in the form of "rm -rf" calls in
util/kit.sh) for removing files and directories which are tracked by Git
but redundant in release tarballs into a set of .gitattributes rules
which allow the same effect to be achieved using "git archive".
