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#Meson needs to learn that Linux is not an operating system unto itself.
No really, like 95% checks for host_machine.system() == 'linux' are wrong, unless you really care about *kernel* specifics like Linux kernel modules. Typically what you want to check is:
- is my compiler GCC / Clang? (use the Meson compiler object for that!)
- is my libc (a recent enough) glibc?
- does this system use a "freedesktop" GUI stack?
- etc etc
![have_ld_preload = ['linux', 'freebsd', 'darwin', 'dragonfly'].contains(host_machine.system())
(from cairo/meson.build)
because surely glibc's ld.so checks which kernel it's running on, and only enables LD_PRELOAD if running on Linux, right?](https://cdn.masto.host/floss/media_attachments/files/110/712/615/648/681/863/original/b312c6dd31e3361a.png "have_ld_preload = ['linux', 'freebsd', 'darwin', 'dragonfly'].contains(host_machine.system())
(from cairo/meson.build)
because surely glibc's ld.so checks which kernel it's running on, and only enables LD_PRELOAD if running on Linux, right?")
![# Linker flags
if host_machine.system() == 'linux'
common_ldflags += cc.get_supported_link_arguments([ '-Wl,-Bsymbolic', '-Wl,-z,relro', '-Wl,-z,now', ])
endif
(from pango/meson.build)
Because surely only Linux builds deserve security features like relro!](https://cdn.masto.host/floss/media_attachments/files/110/712/627/017/752/263/original/419a9eb4375a003a.png "# Linker flags
if host_machine.system() == 'linux'
common_ldflags += cc.get_supported_link_arguments([ '-Wl,-Bsymbolic', '-Wl,-z,relro', '-Wl,-z,now', ])
endif
(from pango/meson.build)
Because surely only Linux builds deserve security features like relro!")
@bugaevc Also, why is "gnu" always "hurd"?
I suppose this is the confusion about the fact that "Linux" is not a platform
It's a kernel
It seems we haven't got a shared definition of what "Linux" encompasses
Oh well...
@abbienormal but then they return 'android' when Android is detected, even though it too is running on the Linux kernel! You'd then think 'linux' means GNU/Linux then, but no, it still returns 'linux' on non-GNU non-Android Linux systems too.
@lanodan @abbienormal hm, what do you mean, which non-Apple Unix stuff?
@bugaevc @abbienormal Like CMake scripts with if(APPLE AND NOT UNIX) or C preprocessors macros with !defined(__APPLE__) && defined(__unix__)
@lanodan @abbienormal if (UNIX AND NOT APPLE) you mean, but yeah, I see.
I would argue that that is an OK pattern if they really want to single out Darwin (maybe for Mach-O or something), but not quite right if what they actually care about is freedesktop-ish vs Cocoa-ish. You can certainly have GNUstep on non-Apple systems, and run a regular X11 desktop on Darwin.
Ah ! Android !
Yeah, "Linux" doesn't mean much
Linux is GNU/Linux with some desktop stack on a PC but that's a totally informal definition
And being so informal, it shouldn't be used in any file meant to be processed by a machine
So much cultural debt
@abbienormal yes, but when building for "Linux" (GNU/Linux) you typically want to treat GNU/Hurd (and GNU/kFreeBSD, etc) the same way, because what you actually care about is GNU, not Linux.
Ah the GNU system ! 
Which is the rather typical issue of most developers being awful at system integration.
@lanodan Meson users too should be aware of this and use it properly, but Meson shouldn't have made it that easy to misuse this.
Like ugh, why didn't they make machine.kernel() and machine.userland() (would return "linux"/"gnu", "linux"/"android", "freebsd"/"freebsd", "freebsd"/"gnu", "xnu"/"darwin")
I think they should have exposed something like the target triple and dedicated functions for each part of it, plus matching on the compiler/linker/… being used (you can mix-match there).
@lanodan yes, target triple + some sane (i.e. not just a regex) API to match against it would also be good. And yes "GNU" is problematic for that reason, and also I have no idea what to call the various non-GNU userlands seen on Linux in the wild (as seen in: Alpine, Chimera Linux, OpenWrt...) — just calling each one by its own name is not going to be any useful.
Maybe we should file an issue and write a proposal over at Meson's issue tracker.
You should always do clean atomic detections based on exactly what you want to use.
Just like how Unix doesn't means X11 or that the entirety of freedesktop stuff is present.
Heck, Android could gain wayland support at some point.
@bugaevc Linux is one of the few systems where checking for the kernel actually makes sense, because Linux had the weird idea to not expose a lot of things via a proper API, but via /proc and /sys.