[webkit-dev] Build File Maintenance (was Re: Please welcome GYP to the our dysfunctional build family)

[Mike Pinkerton]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Dimitri Glazkov<dglazkov at chromium.org> wrote:
>> If you hand-edit Xcode project files enough times you start to understand them, but you also may go insane in the process.  I don't know that you have to write a full parser for it, but there is some non-trivial, minimal structure you have to understand to update the file properly.
>
> GYP generates very nice XCode projects -- they are always properly
> sorted, logically structured, and clean.

I think the difference worth highlighting here is that GYP doesn't
*edit* Xcode projects. That is explicitly a non-goal. It generates new
ones from scatch every time (but is smart enough not to touch anything
if nothing would change). As a result, it doesn't need to know about
all the various ways a project file could change from state A to state
B.

In Chromium, we don't have any Xcode files checked in, they're
generated (again, from scratch, replacing whatever was there before)
on every checkout. If you want to make local changes during the course
of your development, that's fine (and helpful to test small tweaks),
but the only canonical representation of the Xcode project file is in
GYP.

-- 
Mike Pinkerton
Mac Weenie
pinkerton at google.com