.TH MESON "1" "January 2016" "meson 0.29.0" "User Commands"
.SH NAME
meson - a high productivity build system
.SH DESCRIPTION

Meson is a build system designed to optimize programmer
productivity. It aims to do this by providing simple, out-of-the-box
support for modern software development tools and practices, such as
unit tests, coverage reports, Valgrind, CCache and the like.

Using Meson is simple and follows the common two-phase
process of most build systems. First you run Meson to
configure your build:

.B meson [
.I options
.B ] [
.I source directory
.B ] [
.I build directory
.B ]

Note that the build directory must be different from the source
directory. Meson does not support building inside the source directory
and attempting to do that leads to an error.

After a successful configuration step you can build the source by
running the actual build command in the build directory. The default
backend of Meson is Ninja, which can be invoked like this.

\fBninja [\fR \fItarget\fR \fB]\fR

You only need to run the Meson command once: when you first configure
your build dir. After that you just run the build command. Meson will
autodetect changes in your source tree and regenerates all files
needed to build the project.

.SS "options:"
.TP
\fB\-\-version\fR
print version number
.TP
\fB\-\-help\fR
print command line help
.SH SEE ALSO
http://mesonbuild.com/