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

[Simon Hausmann]

On Monday, February 04, 2013 10:57:46 AM Maciej Stachowiak 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.
> 
> I'm reasonably confident at this point that Gyp can meet our hard
> requirements. Our remaining issues are finding time to do it and
> comprehensibility/readability of the syntax.

On the topic of the Gyp syntax:

I find it pretty readable, but I wonder if you guys are open to the idea of 
relaxing the parser a bit to also allow for the omission of quotes and commas 
for the dictionary keys. I feel a syntax like

{
    includes: [
        ...
    ]

    variables: [
    ]
}

is slightly less error prone to type and you could probably still support the 
"stricter" language, too.


Simon