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

[Mark Rowe]

On 2013-01-31, at 01:07, Hajime Morrita <morrita at chromium.org> wrote:

> In my understanding, it doesn't matter whether Apple Mac port supports ninja or not. We could use GNU make if some meta-build system is adopted because Mac OS has it installed. The problem here is that the neither CMake and GYP isn't easy to adopt for reasons discussed in this thread.

As I mentioned in an earlier email, we need to keep the Mac port building via Xcode for our production builds.

> My personal feeling is that we could build a simple meta build system which specifically targetsMac WebKit and XCode.
> 
> It could be just a little more than a templating system which generates the list of files plus their UUIDs. The tool doesn't need to be so general like CMake/GYP. Many tricky configuration things could be in the hard-coded boilerplate. It could just focus on generating file list and UUIDs. It's something like project.pbxproj.in and its preprocessor.
> 
> It won't be a direct step toward the unified build system. But we'll figure out the next step once the build is represented by a simple plain text.

I’ve experimented with this in the past and you’re right that it shouldn’t be particularly difficult to do. However, I suspect that the task would be similar in scope to defining an improved syntax for gyp. And if the syntax is the primary sticking point with gyp then it’d seem preferable to tackle initially.

I should also clarify that I don’t think gyp’s current syntax is a showstoppper for adoption. I’d just like to see it improved.

- Mark

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