Meson

Raised as a usability problem by 7 people on Hacker News over 7 years (2020–2026), in 5 threads.

People raised many different problems with Meson, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 7 complaints

No --help flag like GNU configure, so users can't easily discover build options2026-08-05
Extra preprocessing steps in build systems are difficult and brittle to get working2025-11-06
Hard to understand and tweak Meson build files; confusing for the person performing the build2022-12-23
Sometimes frustrating to use unless you follow the meson way2022-12-23
Configuration uses an imperative language that feels awkward and mistaken compared to declarative or Python2021-09-01
Build failures are a maze of quirks and debugging tooling is weak, so builds are hard to fix2021-09-01
Forces a workflow, auto-detects compiler and blocks valid uses like non-cross builds2020-10-21