[webkit-dev] Build system complexity

[Jeremy Orlow]

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 7:18 AM, David Kilzer <ddkilzer at webkit.org> wrote:

> On Aug 12, 2010, at 3:54 AM, Dumitru Daniliuc <dumi at chromium.org> wrote:
>
> > i completely agree with jeremy. is it possible to at least drop the
> cryptic hashcodes/timestamps? without them, the .xcodeproj files should at
> least be editable by hand.
>
> Doesn't gyp already generate Xcode projects for Chrome?  I think the issue
> is that gyp can't generate replacement project files for Apple's Mac port or
> other build systems yet.  That was my take-away from the last
> discussion--that gyp needed to be enhanced so that all build systems could
> be generated, making addition or removal of source files a trivial task.
>

Chrome has been using GYP for some time and it's pretty stable.  I suspect
that anyone trying to port the Mac port's xcode project to it will run into
some bugs and/or need to build some additional features into it, but it is
quite stable.  And the GYP guys are very friendly people though, so I bet
they'd be happy to help with any such problems.  It's also worth noting that
GYP was designed from the start to allow a project to move over to it slowly
(you can have custom projects depend on GYP projects and vice versa).

But moving to GYP is definitely not the only way to solve this issue--and
quite possibly not the best way.  I suspect that there are also many smaller
steps that could be taken that'd have a big impact.  For example, coming up
with ways to generate sane/informative error messages for when someone
doesn't export some symbol/header file properly would awesome and doesn't
require changing the entire build system.  Or creating some script that can
add files to the xcode project.

J
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