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

[Kevin Ollivier]

Hi Peter,

On Jul 13, 2009, at 2:03 PM, Peter Kasting wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com>  
> wrote:
> One belated comment on this topic. It would be neat if some port  
> agreed to be the guinea pig to see if gyp could plausibly work for  
> more than Google's ports. The Wx port probably has the lowest  
> resources of any complete port in the tree, so they might not be the  
> best choice of experimental subject, particularly if for them the  
> process required writing a new gyp back end and if they are not yet  
> entirely comfortable going the gyp route.
>
> Another note, based on some #chromium conversations: if someone  
> passionate made CMake (or any other tool) into something compelling  
> enough to work better for Chromium than gyp does (or at least to  
> work close-to-as-well), and that tool was more plausible for other  
> ports in the WK tree to adopt, we wouldn't be opposed in principle  
> to using it.  The potential benefits of a shared build system are  
> clear, and we're not trying to tell people that system has to be  
> gyp; we're just probably not prepared to be the ones to go determine  
> other ports' needs and decide on the Build System To Rule Them All.
>
> If no one wants to do this, but other ports do want to try gyp, we  
> can lend them a hand in checking it out too.  Whatever makes things  
> at least a little easier.

After reading Mark's comments, one idea that has been stewing around  
in my head is seeing if it would be possible to have waf optionally  
call the GYP GenerateOutput methods directly, instead of doing a  
build, by converting the final, computed compiler/linker settings into  
a GYP-friendly series of lists/dicts. If that could be made to work,  
it would offer the best of both worlds. On one hand, we have a fast  
and scalable build system that can be extended to do pretty much  
anything you can code up in Python, and on the other, you can still  
use IDE projects if that's what you're comfortable with.

Of course, the big question is if waf would have the same limitations  
as SCons in regards to doing this, but I think it's at least worth  
exploring. I'd be interested to know what limitations you guys ran  
into when trying to use SCons for this sort of thing. Of course, there  
will always be some things that would be hard to do with the IDE  
projects, but it may be possible for us to make use of waf there too,  
by using command line arguments to have it, for example, only generate  
the derived sources, which we could call from the IDE projects.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Kevin

> PK
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