WebKit development on Windows is currently quite tedious and error-prone. This page lists some ideas for how to improve it.

Set-up

Check in a Cygwin installation to svn.webkit.org

​Chromium does this (see ​http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/deps/third_party/cygwin/). This would remove the need for cygwin-downloader, or for users to have Cygwin installed at all. This would fix BuildingOnWindows#MissingpackagesinCygwin.

Allow using non-Cygwin Subversion

This is covered by ​bug 27323 and would fix BuildingOnWindows#Badlineendings.

Building

Detect when the Windows Platform SDK is missing

update-webkit and/or build-webkit should detect when the Windows Platform SDK is missing and warn the user. This would fix BuildingOnWindows#VisualCExpressEdition.

Make "Clean Solution" clean everything

"Clean Solution" in Visual Studio currently leaves behind lots of files, such as autogenerated bindings, so the next build isn't really "clean". We should make "Clean Solution" really clean everything.

Make the build system more maintainable

See MakingTheWindowsBuildSystemMoreMaintainable.

Running/Debugging

Don't copy Safari into %TMP%

run-safari and debug-safari currently copy Safari into %TMP%. We should switch to using WebKitLauncherWin now that Safari 4.0.3 has shipped.

Running Regression Tests

Remove dependency on Mac fonts

Many regression tests currently require the use of Mac fonts which are not available on Windows. We should drop the dependency on these fonts so that people without access to them can run (and pass) the tests.

Detect when required fonts are missing

run-webkit-tests should check when required fonts are missing (e.g., East Asian language support) and warn the user.

Automatically rebase libphp4.dll

run-webkit-tests should automatically rebase libphp4.dll. That would fix BuildingOnWindows#ErrorlaunchingApachefromrun-webkit-testsonVista.