On Nov 12, 2007, at 11:33 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
On Nov 12, 2007, at 5:28 AM, Mark Rowe wrote:
On 13/11/2007, at 00:00, Charles Woloszynski wrote:
I am working on a port of WebKit on Qt to a PowerPC platform.
Please make sure that we don't break the Qt port in this switch.
I am comfortable with autotools, so that is not a big deal for
me. I am concerned, however, that this will cause a fork with
the work being done by the Trolltech folks (since I think that
they are primarily qmake-promoters).
Can we get some feedback from Trolltech on their ability to
accept a switch to autotools for Webkit/Qt so we can switch to
one new engine for all these ports?
It would obviously be great if build systems could be shared
between ports, but at the same time I don't think that this desire
to share build systems should introduce obstacles to the adoption
of WebKit ports in the wider open source community. The
maintainers of the Qt and wxWidgets ports have a desire to keep
their build systems similar to those used by the underlying
toolkits of their port as it greatly simplifies their integration
work. The same is true of the Apple ports and their build systems.
While the introduction of another build system would introduce
slightly more overhead for changes that require modifications be
made to the build system, such changes are relatively infrequent
and are typically simple additions or removals of files. The
extra work required would be small in comparison to the benefit
that the GTK+ port would gain from using a more native build system.
As someone who adds and removes files frequently, I do find the
build system proliferation to be a nontrivial cost. However, I
think the worst build systems from this point of view are ones that
aren't easily human-editable, which I think is mainly the Xcode and
Visual Studio project files. If we add more build systems, it would
be really helpful to put up a page that tells you what steps you
should take if you add or remove files. Maybe we could even write a
script to add a file to or remove a file from all build systems.
I agree. That I can generate those automatically, along with standard
makefiles, from a single text source is the reason I stick with qmake
on my project. You sometimes have to jump through hoops with qmake,
in order to capture complex dependencies or source file generation,
but it does it well on all platforms I use, including Windows, and it
lets me use the XCode gui on Mac, Visual Studio on Windows, emacs and
Make on linux from the same build infrastructure.
I've tried cmake, waf, cons, scons and several others that claim to
be cross-platform build tools, and not found them capable enough,
especially when it comes to targeting Windows development.
Cheers,
Steve
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