Bug 105539 – [GTK] Development builds should be possible without build-webkit

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: WONTFIX
• Component: WebKitGTK

[Zan Dobersek]

There's still interest in building development builds without using build-webkit. One use case provided by Carlos is using custom jhbuild module.

This was, however, recently made impossible as the feature defines listed in Source/WebCore/GNUmakefile.features.am.in are in process of having their values adjusted to represent values intended for release builds. Development values for feature defines are again tracked by the FeatureList.pm, used solely by build-webkit.

This means that development builds are now only possible by using build-webkit due to the release build values being overridden only when autogen.sh is run by build-webkit (as the latter outputs the development-oriented feature define list that is then used by the Tools/gtk/override-feature-defines, which performs the overriding).

[Zan Dobersek]

There are currently at least two manual ways to perform the overriding of desired feature defines' release values:

- creating feature-defines-overriding.txt file (normally created by build-webkit) and listing feature defines that are to be overridden
- modifying the generated (more like copied) GNUmakefile.features.am by adjusting feature define values as desired

But, as said, the listed methods are manual.

[Zan Dobersek]

Carlos and I brainstormed about this on IRC, eventually came to an idea of having an extra Perl script that would use the FeatureList.pm to get the development values for feature defines and work with those from there.

[Zan Dobersek]

Created attachment 180513 [details]
Patch

[Carlos Garcia Campos]

Comment on attachment 180513 [details]
Patch

The problem I see with the patch is that it duplicates the code, ideally we could leave the --enable-unstable-features and call that from build-webkit, but then we could not know whether we need to run autogen again or not. Since I'm probably the only dev affected by this, and I've recently switched to build-webkit, maybe we can just close this bug. What do you think?

[Zan Dobersek]

(In reply to comment #4)
> (From update of attachment 180513 [details])
> The problem I see with the patch is that it duplicates the code, ideally we could leave the --enable-unstable-features and call that from build-webkit, but then we could not know whether we need to run autogen again or not. Since I'm probably the only dev affected by this, and I've recently switched to build-webkit, maybe we can just close this bug. What do you think?

I'm OK with closing this bug if it's not a problem for you anymore. If anyone else voices the desire for this functionality we can reopen it and get it polished.

[Zan Dobersek]

Closing for now, we can reopen it if anyone wants to be able to use this out-of-the-box.