Hi Brent, I definitely agree that gyp is rather undocumented and kind of hard to use. It's nowhere near the level of documentation of CMake, let alone Xcode or GNU makefiles. Hopefully we can fix this in the near future.
That said, I'd be kind of surprised if cmake was already installed on your system, or scons, or xcode, or nmake, or just about anything except for make on Linux & mac ;) -- Dirk On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 9:49 PM, Brent Fulgham <bfulg...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Dimitri, > > <LONG screed follows...> > > On Mar 24, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Dimitri Glazkov wrote: > >> \With the gyp conversion at this stage, we now have a possible solution >> to this problem. Given that there aren't any other viable alternatives >> in the present, please consider the most productive way of >> contributing: filing well-formulated bugs, blocking bug 55018 >> (https://bugs.webkit.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=55018&hide_resolved=1). >> We can then discuss these specific problems and adjust the shape of >> the solution accordingly. > > While I applaud the idea of a unified build system, my own experience trying > to get gyp working has been a uniformly frustrating experience. > > Imagine for a moment that rather than being a Chromium developer, long > schooled in the use of gyp and the various build components needed to support > it, you are a lowly external developer who just wishes to build WebKit. Out > of curiosity, I took a stab at playing with gyp again this evening: > > 1. The top Google hit for "gyp build system" takes me to an exhaustive > specification of the gyp input file syntax format. If I click on the > "Project Home" link, I find no information on downloading or installing the > system. Presumably I can download the source and somehow generate the tool. > > 2. If I go to the User Documentation page > (http://code.google.com/p/gyp/wiki/GypUserDocumentation), I am instructed on > how to draft my own gyp files to build things. But why would I care when I > can't even try the software out on an existing project, like WebKit? > > Once I download the gyp sources and 'build' them using the included > "setup.py", it's not clear what to do with them: > > link:Source brent$ gyp . > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "/usr/local/bin/gyp", line 18, in <module> > sys.exit(gyp.main(sys.argv[1:])) > File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/gyp/__init__.py", line 374, in main > '--depth as a workaround.' > Exception: Could not automatically locate src directory. This is a temporary > Chromium feature that will be removed. Use --depth as a workaround. > link:Source brent$ gyp ./gyp > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "/usr/local/bin/gyp", line 18, in <module> > sys.exit(gyp.main(sys.argv[1:])) > File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/gyp/__init__.py", line 374, in main > '--depth as a workaround.' > Exception: Could not automatically locate src directory. This is a temporary > Chromium feature that will be removed. Use --depth as a workaround. > link:Source brent$ gyp help > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "/usr/local/bin/gyp", line 18, in <module> > sys.exit(gyp.main(sys.argv[1:])) > File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/gyp/__init__.py", line 374, in main > '--depth as a workaround.' > Exception: Could not automatically locate src directory. This is a temporary > Chromium feature that will be removed. Use --depth as a workaround. > link:Source brent$ > > I kind of hate gyp! > > Compare that to the native Xcode projects, CMake files, or normal GNU > Makefiles. These other solutions almost always JUST WORK, because if you can > build any software on your machine, you must have used one of these options. > > I don't use gyp for anything, I don't have it installed, and its not clear > how to go about using it. > > Please don't further raise the barrier of entry to new WebKit developers by > adding yet another obscure build requirement to the system. :-( > > Thanks, > > -Brent > > > > > _______________________________________________ > webkit-dev mailing list > webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org > http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev > _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
