[webkit-dev] Please welcome GYP to the our dysfunctional build family

[Adam Treat]

On Sunday 12 July 2009 10:42:26 am Jeremy Orlow wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 5:38 AM, Adam Treat <treat at kde.org> wrote:
> > On Friday 10 July 2009 12:23:50 am Dimitri Glazkov wrote:
> > > Dear WebKiteurs,
> > >
> > > In our persisting quest to be more like a common WebKit port, we have
> > > added Chromium build files to the tree this afternoon. These files are
> > > WebCore/WebCore.gypi and JavaScriptCore/JavaScriptCore.gypi and they
> > > are the GYP include files. As you may know, we use GYP
> > > (http://code.google.com/p/gyp) for generating MSVC, XCode, Scons, and
> > > even Make projects for Chromium.
> > >
> > > We are rather fond of GYP. Perhaps it is because it allows us to
> > > maintain one set of project files for all three Chromium platforms;
> >
> > Gyp sounds remarkably similar to CMake to me.  I've never heard of Gyp
> > before
> > so I don't know much more about it than what you've said in this email,
> > but CMake has been around for quite sometime and is in very wide use in
> > the Open
> > Source community.  Can you say what prompts the use of Gyp over a tool
> > like CMake?
>
> From a quick glance at cmake's website, it seems that it's a build system
> and not a project file generator.  I think it was pretty important to us to
> generate project files so that you can use the full power of each
> platform's IDE and toolchain.

Take a more detailed look.  CMake is a meta-build system.  It generates native 
project files for Windows Visual Studio, XCode and GNU Makefile.  Just like Gyp 
if I understand correctly.

It has been around for a good amount of time and works under every major 
platform.  KDE uses CMake exclusively to build on every platform.

Cheers,

Adam