[webkit-dev] Haiku + GYP (WAS: Build File Maintenance)

[Mark Mentovai]

This sounds like a good experiment to me too.  I don't know much about
jam (I've generally avoided it in Xcode) but I'd be happy to provide
GYP-side support.

Mark

Jeremy Orlow wrote:
> I'm adding a bunch of the GYP experts to this thread and re-naming it for
> sanity's sake.  :-)
>
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:20 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>>
>> If you're willing to give it a shot, then that sounds like a fine idea.
>>
>>  - Maciej
>>
>> On Jul 15, 2009, at 10:51 PM, Ryan Leavengood wrote:
>>
>>> 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.