[webkit-dev] DerivedSources.make: Another try?

[Brent Fulgham]

Hi All,

I’m arriving to this conversation a bit late, but had a few comments:

On Mar 16, 2014, at 11:06 AM, Patrick Gansterer <paroga at paroga.com> wrote:

> DerivedSources.make depends heavily on UNIX command line tools (cat, sed, sort, ...) which are not part of a clean Windows installation and don't provide Windows like installers.
> The point is if we want to make cygwin (with all of its pro and cons) a requirement. At the moment the minimal requirements for building on Windows are GNU Win32 GPerf, Win flex-bision, Perl, Python and Ruby (which provide nice native Windows installers).
> Bugs like 48166 suggest that also not all Apple folks are happy with cygwin.

To paraphrase Churchill, Cygwin is the worst form of UNIX abstraction, except for all the others. We find that it is a whole lot easier to get a Windows build system up and running using Cygwin than trying to piece together a set of disparate GNU tools built and hosted by different parties.

I would not want to move from a system where I can direct people to download and run our Cygwin installer, to one where I have to point out a dozen different GNU Win32 packages to manually install and setup.

I would be much more interested in a system where we did not need these external tools. For example, driving the entire build system through just CMake with Perl or Python (or Ruby) would be interesting.

Unfortunately, we still have strong need for a number of UNIX-y tools, such as Flex, Bison, and GPerf. This is a common problem for all projects I am aware of that involve language implementations.

So I’m not sure that jettisoning Cygwin is a likely outcome at present.

-Brent