[webkit-dev] Moving away from qmake

[Mark Rowe]

On 13/11/2007, at 00:00, Charles Woloszynski wrote:

> I am working on a port of WebKit on Qt to a PowerPC platform.   
> Please make sure that we don't break the Qt port in this switch.  I  
> am comfortable with autotools, so that is not a big deal for me.  I  
> am concerned, however, that this will cause a fork with the work  
> being done by the Trolltech folks (since I think that they are  
> primarily qmake-promoters).
>
> Can we get some feedback from Trolltech on their ability to accept a  
> switch to autotools for Webkit/Qt so we can switch to one new engine  
> for all these ports?

It would obviously be great if build systems could be shared between  
ports, but at the same time I don't think that this desire to share  
build systems should introduce obstacles to the adoption of WebKit  
ports in the wider open source community.  The maintainers of the Qt  
and wxWidgets ports have a desire to keep their build systems similar  
to those used by the underlying toolkits of their port as it greatly  
simplifies their integration work.  The same is true of the Apple  
ports and their build systems.

While the introduction of another build system would introduce  
slightly more overhead for changes that require modifications be made  
to the build system, such changes are relatively infrequent and are  
typically simple additions or removals of files.  The extra work  
required would be small in comparison to the benefit that the GTK+  
port would gain from using a more native build system.


- Mark