[webkit-gtk] General question: Long compilation times

[Dennis New]

Compiling the latest webkit-gtk took about 3 days of compilation (not
the entire day, just when my laptop was on, but still) on my 1.6ghz
machine, over 2 gigs of ram (even after disabling the unified
jumbo-build), and about a gig of diskspace. I think this took longer
than compiling my entire operating system, including the linux kernel,
all of opengl, the gcc compiler and gtk too.

And all this to basically show some text and images. (I only need this
browser engine to use my bank's website and online maps, even though
there is no good reason why javascript is needed for either.)

Is there a good reason that it needs to be this way, or is this merely
the accidental result of accumulating bloat/feature-creep? A kind of
Rube Goldberg machine? It would be great to have a "minimal" build
option to only compile the essential stuff, hopefully in less than an
hour. Or maybe to break the project up into separate packages that
don't all need to be updated.