[webkit-dev] Windows port experiences

[Eric Seidel]

On Mar 19, 2006, at 8:26 PM, Kevin Ollivier wrote:

> I've been watching the porting movement pretty closely, and seeing  
> the activity on the Windows port I thought I'd see if I could give  
> it a spin. I'm posting my experiences here in hopes that it will  
> help others and also to give some feedback on the whole process. :-)
>
> I pulled a source tree from SVN. I first made the mistake of using  
> TortoiseSVN, but quickly realized that this wasn't good because  
> some of the files need to have Unix line endings, so I did another  
> checkout using Cygwin.

Strange.  TortoiseSVN should respect the svn:eol-style=native (or  
lack there of) property on the individual files.  It sounds like  
Tortoise treats every file as though svn:eol-style=native were set,  
and converts all files to use DOS line endings when you check WebKit  
sources out.  If that's true, it sounds like a bug in the TortoiseSVN  
client.

You are very much encouraged to update http://wiki.opendarwin.org/ 
index.php/WebKit:WebKit_on_Windows with your experiences.

> Then I realized I needed MSVC8 to build. :-) I didn't have MSVC8 so  
> I went to Microsoft's site and downloaded and installed MSVS8  
> Express. I then needed to follow these instructions so that it  
> would also work for building Win32 applications:
>
> http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/visualc/usingpsdk/default.aspx
>
> I also needed to change the "devenv.exe" in <WebKitRoot>/ 
> WebKitTools/Scripts/webkitdirs.pm to "vcexpress.exe". (It'd be nice  
> if there was an easy way to check for one, and if it doesn't exist,  
> check for the other. I know hardly any Perl though. ;-/) Once I did  
> this, I ran install-win-extras and then build-webkit. It built  
> fine, which was a very promising development. :-)

There is an alternative patch already in bugzilla:
http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7802

It sounds like your change might be simpler though.  Please add your  
comments to the bug if you have time.

> I then opened up the Spinneret project and tried to build that. The  
> one annoying thing here is that WebCore and JSCore put build  
> results in subdirs of the main project dir (e.g. C:\oss\webkit 
> \WebKitBuild), but apparently Spinneret has C:\WebKitBuild  
> hardcoded as the location where it expects those files to be.

That sounds like a bug, please file.  http://www.webkit.org/ has  
instructions on how to file a bug.

> I took the quick way out and made a copy of my WebKitBuild folder  
> in C:\. (Is there an easy way to synch this dir with the ones  
> chosen by the JSCore and WebCore projects?) To my further surprise  
> (hey, I know this is alpha code!), I got a working Spinneret  
> binary. Not only that, but it loaded pages and rendered them,  
> including gifs, bulleted lists, text, tables, etc., and they  
> appeared mostly as they do in Safari! I was practically  
> floored! :-) Obviously there is a lot more work to do, but IMHO it  
> is quite impressive to have covered this much ground in such a  
> short period of time! And to have an alpha-state product so  
> smoothly build and run.

> Is it correct to assume that, for the Windows port, everything that  
> works outside of platform/win is cross-platform? That is to say, it  
> should be cross-platform, disregarding any possible glitches. :-)  
> I'm mostly trying to see if the porting effort is really mainly  
> porting platform/win to platform/wx and creating our own sample, or  
> if there are some major gotchas I'm not seeing.

Pretty much everything outside of the platform/$yourfavoriteplatform  
directories is completely platform independent.

-eric