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

[Ryan Leavengood]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 4:56 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.

I would need to discuss it with my student, but what about the brand
new Haiku port being the gyp guinea pig? For those who don't know, I
am mentoring a student in the Google Summer of Code for the Haiku
operating system (http://www.haiku-os.org) and we are working on a
native Haiku web browser with WebKit as the rendering engine.

I don't know if our port is any better of a choice than the Wx port,
since the resources are also small (just two of us for now) and we
aren't even in the WebKit tree yet, but I think we still might be a
good choice because:

1) We obviously don't yet have a "production" browser using our port
so breakage isn't an issue. Plus only my student (Maxime Simon) and I
are working on it.

2) I have decent experience with build systems and think I could
handle working with gyp and writing a new back end.

3) Haiku generally uses Jam for building and we would like our port to
do the same. Rather than adding "Yet Another Build System" to WebKit,
we could use gyp and write a Jam backend for it. This can therefore
serve as a test of gyp for another platform as well as for another
backend.

I would rather not have to maintain a Jamfile for WebKit if I can
avoid it, and I certainly don't want to burden the other WebKit
developers with having to maintain it for what is now (and may forever
be) a tiny port. Though we certainly hope Haiku's popularity increases
in the future (it hasn't even had a first release anyhow, so there is
plenty of room to grow.)

Anyhow, I'd be interested in hearing what other people think.

-- 
Regards,
Ryan