This document is meant for project and distro package maintainers to ease their workflow by explaining how meson build definitions are prepared. If you'd like to contribute to MoreWaita, you are probably interested in Prepare Meson build definitions section. If you'd like to maintain a distribution package for the MoreWaita icon pack, you're probably more interested in Meson build definitions usage section.
For packaging, we use the Meson build system as it's fairly common in both compiled projects like apps and scss themes and non compiled like for example Pyhton applications or icon themes. Since Meson has features for both compiling and installing files, we just use the ones for installing so essentialy for us, it's a standardized installation script.
Since we use a lot of symbolic links to support some applications that might have multiple names and ids depending on the installation source and method, we need a way to keep those links as is, not just install multiple copies of the same icon.
Meson currently doesn't support that transparently with already available install_data function (but logs seem to suggest that might happen in the future), we are using install_symlink function. That however requires us to track for each release which links point to which files and if there are some links that point to other links, they need to be topographically sorted so there would be no errors when linking.
That is done with the dump_groups.py script from the _dev folder. It prints an alphabetically sorted list of all regular (non link) files in the specified directory and groups (a Meson dictionary) of files where the key is a regular or a link file and value is a list of links that point to the corresponding file in the key. Keys can also be links since a link may point to a file which is also a link.
Once some new icons are added, files renamed or links are changed, new list of regular and link files must be generated for that icons directory. To do that, the maintainer needs to dump a list of regular files and groups of link files for the directory containing the changes. This must be done from the theme's root directory.
./_dev/dump_groups.py scalable/apps # trailing slash is not required here
./_dev/dump_groups.py symbolic/appsThe output of these commands needs to be put into the array of regular files and dictionary of link files in the respective Meson build specification (in this example, that's scalable/apps/meson.build and symbolic/apps/meson.build).
The process needs to be repeated for all changed directories.
That way we install all regular files into a target directory and for all links we install them pointing to the corresponding destination file.
Before each release, MoreWaita maintainers are expected to replace the list of regular files in each icon directory with a fresh list and replace the groups of link files in each icon directory with a fresh list, both printed from the dump_groups.py script.
For the usage of meson scripts, please reference to the distributions packaging guidelines and instructions. Any exceptions for a specific distribution will be noted here.