On 6/10/05, Maciej Stachowiak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This is a question that some of us on the Safari/WebKit team have > thought about, but we're not sure which way to go yet. As I see it, > there's two basic options: > > A) Use autotools on every possible platform, even Mac OS X. We used > to do this way long ago towards the start of the project, and over > time we converted to Xcode because of all the nice things we get from > it. So in some ways this would be more of a pain for the existing > WebKit developers at Apple. > > B) Use Xcode projects on OS X, and autotools for ports to more > traditional unix systems (Linux, FreeBSD, etc). The major downside to > this is that to make any kind of build change (even just adding a new > file), you would have to do it twice. And not only that you would > really need a Mac even if that is not your primary dev platform, > since the Xcode project file format is not really human-editable. > > We're really not sure yet which of these is better. I think it might > be best to start with B, and consider converting to A someday if > there are enough active developers on non-Mac platforms.
Yes, that makes sense. The issue indeed is to keep these two build systems in sync, especially in cases where a developer does not have access to a Mac platform for updating the Xcode projects... The qmake tool from Trolltech also used to be able to export from a canonical build-rule format to Makefiles and Xcode project files (at least when I worked on the Mac side over at Trolltech, don't know how well they support XCode 2.0/2.1 today.. might work fine). So that's an option. qmake and SCons are examples of starting from a meta-level description and build platform-dependent Makefile and project environments. I don't know of any good and reliable ways to convert back and forth between GNU automake and XCode projects. --Kent PS: I'm looking at porting WebCore on top of DirectFB/LiTE (www.directfb.org), been working on LiTE recently to make it a very quick way to build toolkits on top of DirecDB, especially for embedded systems, and WebCore/KWQ would be a nice test ground for it, would be interesting to look at Qt code for the conversion part, too -- been a while since I last hacked Qt. _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.opendarwin.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
