Patrick Steinhardt [off-list ref] writes:

I don't really think it makes sense to explicitly point out every
option that we have. We already document how to discover and set
options, and from hereon it follows that you can wire up docs by
running for example `meson setup -Ddocs=man ..`. It's just another
option, and as such it can be discovered by running `meson configure`.

This is something I wasn't aware of. Because I'm used to the Makefile
workflow and I'm not familiar with Meson, I didn't expect it to work
like that.

The benefit of this is that it cannot grow stale like the build options
in our Makefile. These may or may not have documentation, and may or may
not be stale. With Meson, every build option is listed explicitly, has
documentation and is discoverable via `meson configure`.

That's awesome, and I totally I agree we use the benefit of this
self-documenting feature of Meson. Again, I didn't know about that. It's
more of a me-problem than with your code.

Yup, you are always expected to set up the top-level source directory,
not any of the subdirectories. The build instructions are then processed
linearly in Meson, so variables declared before a call to `subdir()`
would be accessible in the subdirectory, as well.

With Makefiles I can build individual targets (like `make docs`), or run
`make` in the docs/ subdir, is something like that also possible with
Meson? Or are you always configuring what to build in `meson configure`
and building all that with `meson compile`?

-- 
Toon