[webkit-help] WebKit "BUILD FAILED"

Tue Jul 28 22:58:23 PDT 2009

Hi Brent,

Thank you for the reply.  In short the answer to all your questions is 'yes'
with these exceptions.
On the "Installing Developer Tools" page in the "Windows" section it says
"1.  If you own Visual Studio 2005." and "2.  If not,."
Well, I own Visual Studio 2005 and since I don't have access to the computer
I originally put it on I installed  it on my newest notebook and proceeded
with the instructions from there.  Because #2 says "If not." I skipped
everything there but I didn't skip reading it.  I don't think any of that
needs to be done, but since you say it works for you and it isn't working
for me I went back and installed that Platform SDK.  I ran things again and
this time I got 8 failed instead of the usual 7 I had been getting before it
stopped and I only had 3 succeeded.  I just ran everything again while
writing this and this time I got 4 succeeded and 14 failed. Very puzzling
why it is different every time.
The other exception is that I had not seen the wiki you mention in number 7,
but when I run "build-webkit" the very beginning of the output has
statements that say where those two environment variables you mention in 6
and 7 are pointing and they are fine, set the way they should be. 
I guess my next step is to break it down into individual pieces and try to
figure out where and why things are going wrong.  That could take days or
weeks, so if you have more ideas I am open to any and all ideas.

Nick

From: Brent Fulgham [mailto:bfulgham at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2009 9:28 PM
To: ncgeier at vistaresources.net
Cc: webkit-help at lists.webkit.org
Subject: Re: [webkit-help] WebKit "BUILD FAILED"

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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