[webkit-dev] WebKit Wishes

[Dirk Pranke]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Filip Pizlo <fpizlo at apple.com> wrote:
> Thanks for sharing this.
>
> On Jan 30, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Eric Seidel <eric at webkit.org> wrote:
>
> I wish we only had one build system (it were easy to add/remove/move files).
>
> I believe changes like http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/74849 are an
> unhealthy sign for the project.  Adam is not the only person who has chosen
> to empty files instead of removing them.  The pain of updating 8 build
> system is so great, we jump through hoops to avoid it.  Which means it took
> us months to move JavaScriptCore/wtf to WTF, and will take us years to kill
> WebCore/platform.
>
>
> +1
>
> This is a hard problem.  It is a problem worth solving.
>
> Do you have more thoughts on this, particularly since you know quite well
> how both Xcode and gyp work?
>
> I suspect this is one of those things that it would be hard to achieve
> consensus on since there are so many stakeholders.  But it may be fruitful
> to have a "what if" discussion about what this might look like.
>

I think we can solve this problem if we agree that we want to. I think
we haven't in the past mostly because we couldn't reach a consensus
that it was worth solving enough to really try.

I would love to see this fixed and would be glad to work on it. I
think we should at least pursue this far enough to fully understand
what our options are and what the costs and tradeoffs might be; does
anyone disagree, and is anyone else willing to help pitch in?

I think there are several possible ways we could solve this. One would
be to switch to a common meta-build system. My understanding is that
Apple's internal production build processes impose certain constraints
here that I don't fully understand, but I know we've discussed the
possibility of checking in generated project files as a workaround.
Maybe there are other options as well to those constraints? I would
love to discuss this further w/ someone from Apple ...

(Also, just to get this out of the way, I don't think gyp needs to be
the solution).

Another alternative would be to write a script that did support at
least the common use cases (add/move/delete files). There have been
attempts in the past, but they have foundered on at least some
perceived skepticism over how well this would work w/ XCode. That
said, I don't think we've really pushed this to see. At some point
this script might turn into a meta-meta-build system, which might be
silly but also be the shortest path to the finish line.

I suggest if there is interest in this we can start a new thread to
discuss further ...

-- Dirk