[webkit-dev] Towards a unified build system

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Mar 1, 2011, at 11:07 AM, Adam Barth wrote:

> 
> 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.

It needs to be either an xcodeproj or a Makefile. Also, all tools required for building have to be either be part of the OS, or part of what is submitted for the given project. So if gyp scripts need to execute at build time, they'd either have to be checked in to the WebKit repository, or get added to Mac OS X.

I asked Mark Rowe about this and he says the current gyp-generated Xcode projects would not build in Apple's central build system at all, so I guess that hurdle would need to be cleared before we even replace the existing checked-in xcodeproj files. Mark is probably our top expert on how Apple's build system works.

(For those who have mentioned changing how submission to the central build system works, that is largely beyond the Safari team's control, so while it is possible in theory, it is probably not a practical option.)

Regards,
Maciej