[webkit-dev] Towards a unified build system

[Adam Barth]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 5:18 AM, Adam Roben <aroben at apple.com> wrote:
> Reducing the number of build systems is a face-meltingly worthy goal. I have one small question:
>
> On Mar 1, 2011, at 4:21 AM, Adam Barth wrote:
>> 3) Remove the xcodeproj files from svn.webkit.org and integrate the
>> generation of xcodeproj files with the WebKit build / update scripts.
>> At this point, contributors will notice that something has changed
>> because there'll be one less build system to worry about keeping up to
>> date!
>
> Won't contributors who don't use update-webkit/build-webkit also notice something has changed, because they will no longer have any project files? (I ask this as a contributor who doesn't use update-webkit/build-webkit.)

Yes.  Step 3 will certainly be visible to contributors.  As we get
closer to being able to switch over, we'll probably want to discuss
the best way to approach that.  One possibility is to have something
like a "./configure" script, as is common in many open-source
projects.

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 9:33 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
> Another consequence of step 3 is it would break submissions to Apple's central build system, since those pull from the repository with vanilla SVN and do not run special scripts afterwards.

I don't fully understand the constraints of Apple's central build
system.  It might be worthwhile talking over the constraints with
someone who's an expert.

If the requirements are that the entry point to the build system is an
xcodeproj, we can create an xcodeproj with an action that creates the
other xcodeproj files and then defers to the generated projects as
dependencies.  I haven't tested this approach, but I suspect we'll
find something that satisfies the Apple-internal constraints.

Adam