meson.setupHook: prefer meson commands over ninja

Meson now comes with its own set of commands for building, testing,
installing etc., that by default wrap around Ninja.  The reason to
prefer using the Meson commands is that they take additional
options (e.g. setting custom timeouts for tests — my motivation for
this change).

Here, I've modified the Meson setup hook so that Meson's test and
install commands will be used instead of Ninja's when Meson's
configurePhase is used.  This restriction is to avoid starting to run
Meson directly when dealing with custom build systems that wrap around
Meson, like QEMU's.  We don't use meson's compile command, as it just
runs ninja, and that's handled fine by the existing Ninja setup hook.

Naturally the Meson commands don't support entirely the same set of
options that the Ninja ones did, but I checked through Nixpkgs to find
any packages using Meson that used any options that wouldn't be picked
up by this new system.  I only found one, and it was just setting
checkTarget = "test", which is the default value for Ninja and has no
Meson equivalent (because we directly tell Meson to run the tests
rather than going through a generic job system like Ninja).

Link: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/113829
Co-authored-by: Jan Tojnar <jtojnar@gmail.com>

2 files changed, 25 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/doc/hooks/meson.section.md b/doc/hooks/meson.section.md
index fd7779e6468f6..7496def5806f8 100644
--- a/doc/hooks/meson.section.md
+++ b/doc/hooks/meson.section.md
@@ -1,16 +1,28 @@
 # Meson {#meson}
 
-Overrides the configure phase to run meson to generate Ninja files. To run these files, you should accompany Meson with ninja. By default, `enableParallelBuilding` is enabled as Meson supports parallel building almost everywhere.
+Overrides the configure, check, and install phases to run `meson setup`, `meson test`, and `meson install`.
+
+Meson is a meta-build system so you will need a secondary build system to run the generated build files in build phase. In Nixpkgs context, you will want to accompany Meson with ninja, which provides a [setup hook](#ninja) registering a ninja-based build phase.
+
+By default, `enableParallelBuilding` is enabled as Meson supports parallel building almost everywhere.
 
 ## Variables controlling Meson {#variables-controlling-meson}
 
 ### `mesonFlags` {#mesonflags}
 
-Controls the flags passed to meson.
+Controls the flags passed to `meson setup`.
+
+##### `mesonCheckFlags` {#mesoncheckflags}
+
+Controls the flags passed to `meson test`.
+
+##### `mesonInstallFlags` {#mesoninstallflags}
+
+Controls the flags passed to `meson install`.
 
 ### `mesonBuildType` {#mesonbuildtype}
 
-Which [`--buildtype`](https://mesonbuild.com/Builtin-options.html#core-options) to pass to Meson. We default to `plain`.
+Which [`--buildtype`](https://mesonbuild.com/Builtin-options.html#core-options) to pass to `meson setup`. We default to `plain`.
 
 ### `mesonAutoFeatures` {#mesonautofeatures}
 
@@ -23,3 +35,11 @@ What value to set [`-Dwrap_mode=`](https://mesonbuild.com/Builtin-options.html#c
 ### `dontUseMesonConfigure` {#dontusemesonconfigure}
 
 Disables using Meson’s `configurePhase`.
+
+##### `dontUseMesonCheck` {#dontusemesoncheck}
+
+Disables using Meson’s `checkPhase`.
+
+##### `dontUseMesonInstall` {#dontusemesoninstall}
+
+Disables using Meson’s `installPhase`.
diff --git a/doc/hooks/ninja.section.md b/doc/hooks/ninja.section.md
index 4b0e33feb5c39..bbc9481088041 100644
--- a/doc/hooks/ninja.section.md
+++ b/doc/hooks/ninja.section.md
@@ -1,3 +1,5 @@
 # ninja {#ninja}
 
 Overrides the build, install, and check phase to run ninja instead of make. You can disable this behavior with the `dontUseNinjaBuild`, `dontUseNinjaInstall`, and `dontUseNinjaCheck`, respectively. Parallel building is enabled by default in Ninja.
+
+Note that if the [Meson setup hook](#meson) is also active, Ninja's install and check phases will be disabled in favor of Meson's.