[webkit-help] WebKit "BUILD FAILED"

[Brent Fulgham]

Hi Nick,

I have now set up four different PC's under Windows XP, Vista, and  
WIndows 7 to build WebKit and I can confirm that the steps and  
settings needed to do so are all documented on the WebKit website, and  
that build problems generally boil down to having overlooked one or  
more of the necessary steps.  Unlike the Windows development you are  
probably familiar with, the WebKit project is heavily cross-platform,  
and uses a build infrastructure that is more akin to Linux  
development.  Substantial portions of the code are generated by Perl  
scripts (which in turn are driven by Makefiles, which are in turn  
kicked off by Visual Studio build phases), so your best bet is to get  
the standard build working as documented on the web pages before  
attempting to make many changes.

It's not clear to me from your message exactly what sequence of steps  
you took in your build attempt.

1.  You mention Cygwin, Visual Studio 2005, and QT SDK.  Did you also  
install (or already have) the "Windows Server 2003 R2 Platform SDK"  
installed?

* If you have a different SDK (e.g., the now-current Server 2008 SDK),  
WebKit won't build out of the box.  A few minor tweaks are needed to  
get it building.
* Also, if you don't have the paths to the SDK set up as described in  
Step 2 of "http://webkit.org/building/tools.html", you will also get  
errors.

2.  Did you install the Cygwin tools using the WebKit Cygwin  
downloader?  Or did you have an existing installation you are  
attempting to use?  I have seen several failures caused by missing  
Cygwin tools (e.g., 'gperf', etc.)

3.  Windows builds encounter all kinds of grief due to line endings.   
If you use the WebKit Cygwin installer, and use the default settings  
you get the correct line endings.  If you use something like "Tortoise  
SVN" it often 'helpfully' changes line endings, causing various bash  
scripts to suddenly fail.  I know the Chromium guys have been trying  
to resolve this problem, but I'm not sure if they are finished yet.

4.  Did you install the WebKit Support Libraries as described in http://webkit.org/building/checkout.html? 
   This contains various headers and libraries needed to perform the  
full build.

5.  Once you had the sources and tools installed, did you run the  
"update-webkit" script?  This downloads a few support libraries, as  
well as unzipping the "WebKit Support Libraries" tarball and placing  
it in the expected location.

6.  Did you set the "WEBKITOUTPUTDIR" environment variable, as  
described in http://webkit.org/building/build.html?  This variable is  
used by the VS projects to determine where to place things, and where  
to find the autogenerated files produced by other steps in the build.   
This sounds sort of like what you are wrestling with.

7.  Did you set the "WEBKITLIBRARIESDIR" environment variable, as  
described in http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/BuildingOnWindows?  This  
variable is also used by the VS projects to determine where to find  
the support libraries and header files.

Otherwise, try attaching the build logs to your next e-mail so we can  
see where it is failing.

-Brent
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