An overhaul of Meson's WrapDB dependency management/package manager service

For several years already Meson has had a web service called WrapDB for obtaining and building dependencies automatically. The basic idea is that it takes unaltered upstream tarballs, adds Meson build definitions (if needed) as a patch on top and builds the whole thing as a Meson subproject. While it has done its job and provided many packages, the UX for adding new versions has been a bit cumbersome.

Well no more! With a lot of work from people (mostly Xavier Claessens) all of WrapDB has been overhauled to be simpler. Instead of separate repos, all wraps are now stored in a single repo, making things easier.  Adding new packages or releases now looks like this:

• Fork the repo
• Add the necessary files
• Submit a PR
• Await results of automatic CI and (non-automatic :) reviewer comments
• Fix issues until the PR is merged

The documentation for the new system is still being written, but submissions are already open. You do need the current trunk of Meson to use the v2 WrapDB. Version 1 will remain frozen for now so old projects will keep on building. All packages and releases from v1 WrapDB have been moved to v2, except some old ones that have been replaced by something better (e.g. libjpeg has been replaced by libjpeg-turbo) so starting to use the new version should be transparent for most people.

Submitting new dependencies

Anyone can submit any dependency project that they need (assuming they are open source, of course). All you need to do is to convert the project's build definition to Meson and then submit a pull request as described above. You don't need permission from upstream to submit the project. The build files are MIT licensed so projects that want to provide native build definitions should be able to integrate WrapDB's build definitions painlessly.

Submitting your own libraries

Have you written a library that already builds with Meson and would like to make it available to all Meson users with a single command:

meson wrap install yourproject

The procedure is even simpler than above, you just need to file a pull request with the upstream info. It only takes a few minutes.