On Mon, 02 Nov 2026 at 16:38:31 +0100, Helmut Grohne wrote:
At this point, Build-Depends can be installed. Unfortunately, meson
refuses to configure. It objects to enabling the introspection and vala
features as we cannot run host binaries.
Actually we can, if `meson env2mfile` is used to generate a cross-file
that sets exe_wrapper to the Debian-specific
MULTIARCH-cross-exe-wrapper. This is a long-standing feature request for
debhelper, which currently uses the deprecated debcrossgen tool, which
the meson maintainer doesn't want to improve any further (see also
#1111001, https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debhelper/-/merge_requests/127)
but `export MESON_USE_NEW_CROSSGEN=1` in debian/rules should be enough
to make this work.
I think using `meson env2mfile` would be preferable to patching the
upstream build system to pretend that introspection can work without the
ability to run host binaries.
Then, the build proceeds quite far until meson launches the wrong
vapigen. This is not a bug in librsvg but in meson itself and it is
reported as #1126007.
If the build uses `meson env2mfile`, then recent Meson should resolve
this without necessarily needing to look up vapigen via pkg-config,
because https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/15056 was merged.
(Or the cross-file
/usr/share/meson/cross/${DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE}-vala.ini is also available.)
smcv
