Meson uses a venerable GNU convention described in https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Scripts_002dbased-Testsuites.html in which: > When no test protocol is in use, an exit status of 0 from a test > script will denote a success, an exit status of 77 a skipped test, an > exit status of 99 a hard error, and any other exit status will denote > a failure. 77 is thus what we want, not 99.