meson vs tarballs

I and several colleagues have just been trying to build from a tarball
with meson.

`meson setup build .` results in this:

[...]

Message: checking for file conflicts between source and build directory

meson.build:2963:2: ERROR: Problem encountered:
****
Non-clean source code directory detected.

To build with meson the source tree may not have an in-place, ./configure
style, build configured. You can have both meson and ./configure style
builds
for the same source tree by building out-of-source / VPATH with
configure. Alternatively use a separate check out for meson based builds.

Conflicting files in source directory:

[huge list of files]

The conflicting files need to be removed, either by removing the files
listed
above, or by running configure and then make maintainer-clean.

****

That seems pretty awful and unfriendly and I didn't see anything about
it in the docs.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com