On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Patrick Gansterer <par...@paroga.com> wrote: > > Am 31.01.2013 um 17:17 schrieb Maciej Stachowiak: > > > On Jan 31, 2013, at 1:56 AM, Patrick Gansterer <par...@paroga.com> wrote: > > Am 31.01.2013 um 10:37 schrieb Ryosuke Niwa: > > On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 1:17 AM, Jochen Eisinger <joc...@chromium.org> > wrote: >> >> Another option is to add a webkit-patch command for modifying the build >> files. That way, the syntax doesn't need to be overly human friendly. There >> was also some attempt to write a tool to add files automatically: >> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61772 I would expect that such a >> tool becomes easier if it would only modify one source of truth and >> generates all other artifacts such as Xcode projects from it. > > > I don't want build file's syntax to be so human unfriendly that I need a > tool for it. > > Often times, these syntax problems can be improved dramatically by simple > changes. e.g. we had a similar discussion about TestExpectation syntax, and > I'm much happier with the new syntax even though the new syntax is > functionally equivalent to the old one, and two syntaxes are very similar. > > On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 1:17 AM, Mark Rowe <mr...@apple.com> wrote: >> >> I’ve experimented with this in the past and you’re right that it shouldn’t >> be particularly difficult to do. However, I suspect that the task would be >> similar in scope to defining an improved syntax for gyp. And if the syntax >> is the primary sticking point with gyp then it’d seem preferable to tackle >> initially. > > > Yeah. In fact, we can just come up with whatever syntax we like and convert > it to the existing gyp format if the syntax was the biggest issue. > > > Do we want to define the whole build system (including information how to > invoke the generators) with the new system, or is a "simple" list for the > input files sufficient? IMHO adding a new generator build step happens very > rarely. So maybe we can spit the "input file list" (mainly *.cpp and *.idl) > into new files. > Then GYP and CMake can read them and generate the build system out of them > directly (like they to already today) instead of listing the files in the > *.gpyi and *.cmake. This might work for other systems like qmake too. > For XCode we can maybe have a "template XCode project" and generate the > "work XCode project" with a script. This script then only need to fill in > the files from the "input file list" into the "template XCode project". > Defining the feature flags can be done like Maciej suggested with "Port.h" > files. > > > I think it would be better to adapt an existing meta build system to our > needs than to make one from scratch, unless we find that completely > impractical. > > In particular, gyp and cmake both know how to handle generated sources, and > while it may not be super common to make a new type of generated source, > it's bad for hackability of the project of doing so is super hard. We get a > lot of hackability benefits from using various kinds of generated sources, > many first introduced in the days when we had a lot fewer build systems. So > in my mind, they are already ahead of a hypothetical "simple" system. > > > Do you want to kick the requirements of the smaller ports from trunk or do > you think that e.g. a qmake generate for GYP makes sense? > AFAIK e.g. QtWebKit is shipped with Qt, which uses qmake as build system, > where CMake/GYP is not an option. >
It could certainly make sense for us to add Autotools and Qmake generators to GYP; I'm less certain if a CMake generator makes much sense, but I haven't thought about it as much. I'm not super familiar with any of these three tools, so I could be dead wrong. > I completely agree that creating a new meta meta build system isn't a good > idea, but sharing the common parts (which reduce the daily productivity) > might be a step in the right direction. Using simple text files which > contain the list of files (like the gpyi files already do today) isn't a new > build system. It only offers the existing meta build systems (CMake, GYP, > autotools, qmake) to use a common base. > > The remaining build systems can be ported to one of these systems or be > adopted to use this file lists too. > > -- Patrick I suspect that we would quickly find that we would want some sort of support for conditionals and/or file inclusion in our "simple text files", at which point you basically get a meta-meta-build system :). I don't actually think such a thing is that bad of an idea, but it's all in the details. I would like to find a solution where all of the ports were able to retain integration with their "native" build environments one way or another. -- Dirk _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
