Default CodeQL action uses Ubuntu Jammy, which has a very old version of Meson

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#2,875 2 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
github-actions
Domain
build-system, ci-cd

Research direction

Start by tracing the default CodeQL Autobuild configuration that selects Ubuntu 22.04 and reviewing the reported meson.build version requirement. Reproduce the failure with the gamemode example, then verify that the selected environment provides Meson 1.3.1 or newer and that Autobuild completes successfully.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

question

I'm targeting a project that is more interested in leading-edge distros than most (https://github.com/a5ehren/gamemode/tree/master) and have restricted the minimum Meson version to 1.3.1 in order to clean out a bunch of deprecated code - but the stock CodeQL Autobuild action uses Ubuntu 22.04 and installs Meson from the repos, which is version 0.61.2 which is 4+ years old.

[2025-04-30 14:01:19] [build-stdout] unzip is already the newest version (6.0-26ubuntu3.2).
[2025-04-30 14:01:19] [build-stdout] 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 19 not upgraded.
[2025-04-30 14:01:19] [build-stderr] cpp/autobuilder: using built-in deptrace DB
[2025-04-30 14:01:20] [build-stderr] cpp/autobuilder: launched deptrace server
[2025-04-30 14:01:20] [build-stderr] cpp/autobuilder: Using build system found in '.'
[2025-04-30 14:01:20] [build-stderr] cpp/autobuilder: trying to run meson .. [current dir: /home/runner/work/gamemode/gamemode/_codeql_build_dir]
[2025-04-30 14:01:25] [build-stdout] The Meson build system
[2025-04-30 14:01:25] [build-stdout] Version: 0.61.2
[2025-04-30 14:01:25] [build-stdout] Source dir: /home/runner/work/gamemode/gamemode
[2025-04-30 14:01:25] [build-stdout] Build dir: /home/runner/work/gamemode/gamemode/_codeql_build_dir
[2025-04-30 14:01:25] [build-stdout] Build type: native build
[2025-04-30 14:01:25] [build-stdout] ../meson.build:1:0: ERROR: Meson version is 0.61.2 but project requires >= 1.3.1

The fix here is to either:

  1. Install the latest meson from pip and use that.
  2. Update the action to run on Ubuntu 24.04.
Dominant language
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