Ability to specify a different meson.build file

[LunarLambda]

I have a project with a large number of subprojects (essentially a mini wrap-DB for a very specific platform). For development I currently use a git branch with a different meson.build file that just compiles every single subproject instead of only the ones used as dependencies. This has some downsides, like not being able to properly git merge and needing to manually import the subprojects/ directory, cross files, etc. to the main branch. It's also suboptimal because release tags are done against the development branch. Using a subdirectory with a symlink to subprojects is a pretty ugly hack in my opinion. It would be nice if meson setup just let me specify a different filename, say meson.build.dev or whatever.

The project Branch diff

[eli-schwartz]

It seems like it would be a lot easier to just have both versions in meson.build but separated by an if/else, and then you could consistently git merge the changes without fear. All you'd need to do is ensure that a single global variable defining whether or not you are in dev mode, is unchanged and different between branches -- since that section of the file wouldn't change, git merge wouldn't create conflict markers for it.

[LunarLambda]

yeah. I wanted to keep the user-facing "template" build code separate from the dev code. Maybe I could do a subdir call and call that conditionally instead though. That would keep it small. I'll try that

[LunarLambda]

Added meson/dev subdir similar to meson/toolchain and then the following

if get_option('dev')
    subdir('meson/dev')
    subdir_done()
endif