Yeah that's a case where functions could be useful but I think the real problem there is the non-perfect backwards compatibility in Meson, which makes it unnece

Yeah that's a case where functions could be useful but I think the real problem there is the non-perfect backwards compatibility in Meson, which makes it unnecessarily hard to include new versions of it in stable distros. The main culprit is GNOME packages because they were early adopters of Meson and thus had a few incorrect idioms that were cargo culted to a few dozen packages. For a similar issue in RHEL we decided to update Meson, but we needed to revert some changes that tightened the language. I do plan to include those changes in Meson in the near future, keyed on the minimum version in the "project" line, so that older packages are easier to build with newer Meson. That said, did you consider backporting the new features to the older Meson in Debian stable?