Bug 32041 – [wx] Get DumpRenderTree building after waf switch

• Component: WebKit wx
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Kevin Ollivier]

Restore the DumpRenderTree build for wx after the switch to waf.

[Kevin Ollivier]

Created attachment 44113 [details]
patch to build DRT as part of wx build process

[WebKit Review Bot]

style-queue ran check-webkit-style on attachment 44113 [details] without any errors.

[Eric Seidel (no email)]

Comment on attachment 44113 [details]
patch to build DRT as part of wx build process

rs=me.  I'm still confused why wx would want to have its own build system.  That just seems like more headache/overhead for a project with so few maintainers.

[Kevin Ollivier]

(In reply to comment #3)
> (From update of attachment 44113 [details])
> rs=me.  I'm still confused why wx would want to have its own build system. 
> That just seems like more headache/overhead for a project with so few
> maintainers.

Not really. One thing I learned from maintaining wxWebKit for several years is that dealing with IDEs and their limitations accounts for a large degree of maintenance effort.

After the switch to waf, I rarely ever touch the wx build system; it pretty much autodetects most changes and maintains itself. :) To give an example, a grep in WebCore/ChangeLog for .gypi yields 147 results but a grep for wscript yields 6. So since it's introduction in August, I have changed the WebCore/wscript file 6 times, with the first being its introduction into the codebase. :-) WebKitTools/wx/settings.py, the most often changed file, has 26 changes, including its introduction. (Half of those changes were in the first month as we ironed out the bugs in the build system.) This is a general idea of how much I've needed to update the build system over 4 months to keep things running smoothly.

My impression is that a vast majority of the build fix commits I make these days are actual source code issues - a new abstract client interface method I need to implement, a missing header the wx port needs on platform X, etc. In hindsight, even though it's a small list of files now, I actually should have made the DRT wscript auto-generate the list of sources to build too, but I can do that next time a change is needed.

In the end, even sharing maintenance work means doing some maintenance work - I prefer to just have the computer do it for me whenever possible so that I nor anyone else has to do it, and also avoid filling the commit history with "adding file X to the Y port build..." messages. And I haven't even talked about how waf automatically takes advantage of multi-processor machines to speed up the build for all users and seems to have less overhead than make on Unix... ;) And, I mean, it's Python, the language I'd like to do everything in. ;)
 
Anyway, landed in r51618, thanks!