[webkit-dev] Common build system (was Re: WebKit Wishes)

[Mark Rowe]

On 2013-02-04, at 10:57, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:

> 
> On Feb 4, 2013, at 10:46 AM, Mark Mentovai <mark at chromium.org> wrote:
> 
>> GYP was written in Python to address point (b). Python was already part of the baseline requirements on all platforms, so we already had Python available everywhere we needed it. There are no dependencies on external binaries, and no compiled code needs to be checked in anywhere or maintained as part of a base image.
>> 
>> As for point (a), you can easily have a top-level Makefile not generated by GYP that says “run GYP to produce the build files for whatever environment you like and then pass control to that build system to do the rest of the build. Developers who like it can use ninja for their own builds, and your bots can use Xcode or make if that’s a requirement (or if ninja doesn’t meet your requirements given point (b)).
> 
> Checking in the generated Xcode projects is another alternative. The Makefile might be better for the reasons you suggest, though.

It’s not immediately obvious to me that a Makefile that ran GYP would be suitable for our production builds. I think it would be materially the same as building with something other than Xcode, in that it would limit the integration with the rest of the Apple build infrastructure.

- Mark