Thanks, individual.
Personally, I had no confidence that
- It would pick up on the /usr/lib & /usr/lib64 thing
- I could install it to a $DESTDIR
- I would be able to leave out the heavyweight Radeon & Nouveau directories which I don't need on my laptop
- That it could even get the cpu optimisations right. I don't want to do it.
When I look at what the current Mesa maintainer has done, he appears to have no confidence in it either. He has put in a 206 line script which clearly implies meson cannot be trusted. Gnu Autotools had some level of cop on, and good help and feedback.
I was at the stage where I had hacked into mesa_options.txt, and was able to specify what directories I wanted to build, and I could get the command-line options to handle the prefrix & libdir, but was looking for the rest and had given up reading verbiage for one day. There's no torch burning under my a** these days, so personal preference can assert itself.