Bug 97573 – [GTK] WebKitGTK+ is very hard to build and test

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: FIXED
• Component: WebKitGTK

[Martin Robinson]

WebKitGTK+ is very hard to build, so this is a metabug that tracks making it easier.

[Martin Robinson]

I think this bug should also track problems getting the layout tests and unit tests running and passing, so I've expanded it.

[Zan Dobersek]

What exactly is meant under 'very hard to build'? The dependencies issues or build time or something else?

[Martin Robinson]

(In reply to comment #2)
> What exactly is meant under 'very hard to build'? The dependencies issues or build time or something else?

There are a few issues that make it hard to build WebKitGTK+. One is the requirement for a patched version of make and another is that debug builds take a long time and typically consume a lot of memory.

Additionally, there are many small things that can go wrong when building WebKitGTK+ for the first time. This bug is about fixing all those issues so that it's a simple and easy as possible to build the library.

The dependencies issue isn't such a big deal, but perhaps we should include a special jhbuild that has the dependency delta from the previous stable version of Ubuntu.

[Simon Pena]

This has not exactly been fixed, but Andrés Gómez has been working quite a bit on that direction.

See http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKitGTK/StartHacking and linked pages.

[Martin Robinson]

I think this a lot easier these days with the JHBuild and our switch to CMake.