libdrm_intel is needed to build i915; if you want to disable it you can use `-Ddri-drivers=i965` (or any other value that doesn't contain `i915`, although right now those are the only possibilities)

How did you configure autotools when that's what you were using to build mesa?

autotools detects possible drivers per platform and per cpu arch.
The latter may be an overkill but the former is a must IMHO.

Currently I haven't tested building on any platform other than Linux for meson. Honestly macOS isn't on my list of targets, I don't have a mac to test with and my employer doesn't care about mesa with mac, but I'm planning to get windows working which should fix issues like looking for libdrm and trying to build drm drivers unconditionally.

In the mean time (or after windows support lands) if macOS is of interest to you I'd be happy to review patches to support meson on macOS. If that's of interest to you there is more work that needs to be done than just fixing the list of drivers that are being built by default on non-free oses (xlib based glx isn't building with meson yet, among other things.)

Okay, I've found a macbook and I'm going to look into getting meson working for macos. I need some information though.

What configuration options are supposed to work on macOS? swrast? softpipe? llvmpipe? osmesa? glx? egl? obviously not dri drivers.

What autotools configuration did you provide?

What packages did you have to install from source/macports/homebrew/etc.

I can successfully build mesa under macOS 10.14 (Mojave).