Meson project status update

The text below is a copy of this post to the Meson development mailing list.

Hello everyone

The last few weeks have been an amazing ride for the Meson project. We
have gone from "interesting but niche" to being seriously considered
for such core infrastructure projects as Mesa, Wayland, Xorg and even
systemd. I would like to thank everyone who has contributed in making
this possible. Thanks to all contributors, evangelists, those who have
converted their projects, or even proposed it. We would not be here
without you.

However having this much growth brings with it new problems. The main
one of these, as most of you have probably noticed, is the growth in
pull request backlog. I know there are MRs that have been waiting for
quite a while and that this is very frustrating to those people who
have filed them. My apologies to you, we are trying to make this
better.

The second issue is the perennial problem of documentation.
Interestingly these two issues are quite tied together in unexpected
ways.

One of the things which is taking a lot of time for me personally is
making sure that all the documentation is up to date after merge
requests are done. This is a major problem and is limiting the number
of changes that can go in.

We have examined various ways of solving this problem. We have a PoC
for moving all documentation away from the Github wiki and inside the
main repository. This way we can require that all merge requests come
with corresponding documentation changes. This would reduce the review
burden.

A preview of the site can be seen here: http://mesonbuild.com/experimental/

The downside of this approach is that we would lose the ability to do
in-browser wiki editing, and even typo fixes would need to go via pull
requests. This is unfortunate. There does not seem to be a solution
that would work for both use cases. Final decisions on this have not
been made, so if there are people who have good suggestions or prior
experience with this, please speak up.

There are many other ways to help, too. Thus far I have done a large
fraction of, well, everything, ranging from bug reports to review to
designing new features and helping people on the mailing list. All of
these activities are fun and interesting, but there is only so much
time and I feel I'm already spreading myself too thin. This causes
problems such as the above mentioned backlog of merge requests.

We already have a wonderful group of people doing great work on IRC
and elsewhere. Thank you all for your efforts. But the fact of the
matter is that if the project continues seeing more uptake, we are
going to need more helpers, especially reviewers. Currently this task
rests almost entirely on me and Nirbheek. Any help on this would be
greatly appreciated. Just going over the code and saying "based on a
cursory glance this seems ok" would be helpful.

The one elephant in the room is that currently only I have merge
access to master. This is an obvious bottleneck, but if we manage to
fix the other issues listed above it should not be a limiting issue.
Still, if usage and contributions keep growing, we might consider a
multi-maintainer mode. The project is now large enough that we can
have subsystem maintainers, much in the same way as in the Linux
kernel. Example of these could include Windows maintainer, Gnome tools
maintainer, Qt maintainer, Android maintainer, documentation
maintainer and so on. A different approach would be to just have more
people with commit access and allowing them to move around the code as
they have interest. If you have experience or knowledge on how to best
handle this, please let us know.

Thank you all, and keep on compiling!