[sylpheed:36812] Building Sylpheed using Meson

[Thomas White]

Hi everyone,

I've been experimenting with converting Sylpheed to use the Meson build
system (https://mesonbuild.com/) instead of GNU autotools.  Many other
projects are switching to Meson, which has plenty of advantages
including out-of-tree builds, much higher speed, reproducible building
and less historical baggage.

If you're interested, you can find the results here:
https://git.bitwiz.me.uk/?p=sylpheed.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/taw/meson
(where you will also find a Git mirror of the Sylpheed SVN repository).
Simply install Meson, clone the repository, checkout branch taw/meson,
then:
$ meson build                            # set up
$ ninja -C build                           # compile
$ build/sylpheed                         # to test without installing
$ sudo ninja -C build install

To add the update check feature for the main program, do this before
compiling:
$ meson configure -Dupdate_check=true build
Similarly for the update check for plugins:
$ meson configure -Dupdate_check_plugin=true build

All other optional features (compface, GtkSpell etc) will be
automatically enabled if the relevant libraries are found.  Note that
GPGME will only be detected starting from the next release of Meson
(0.51.0).

There are probably loads of things I've missed.  The ones I know about
are that LDAP and JPilot are not currently implemented.  I lack the
means to test on Windows and Mac OS, although in theory those should
also work.

All feedback is welcome!

Tom

-- 
Thomas White <taw at bitwiz.me.uk>