= Making the Windows build system more maintainable =

The Windows build system is currently not very maintainable, especially for users on other platforms trying to edit the Windows build files by hand. This page lists ideas for how to make the system more maintainable, and thus reduce the number of build breakages that occur.

== Use `.vsprops` files more ==

`.vsprops` files allow us to reduce setting duplication within and between `.vcproj` files. Using `.vsprops` files more would make it easier and less error-prone to modify the Windows build files.

== Move header/resource copying into separate scripts ==

Header/resource copying currently happens in build events inside the `.vcproj` files. These are XML-escaped and not line-wrapped and thus very hard to parse or edit by hand. Moving the copying into separate scripts would make it much easier to modify.

== Consolidate or eliminate Release and Debug `.def` files ==

A common build mistake is to only update the Release or only update the Debug `.def` file for JavaScriptCore or WebKit. By consolidating these files we could eliminate this kind of error. Consolidation would probably require the use of a script, which would unfortunately make the build more complicated, but the extra complexity might be worth the reduction in user-error.

Another option would be to eliminate the `.def` files completely by using `__declspec(dllexport)` and `__declspec(dllimport)`.

== Switch to using `gyp` ==

[http://code.google.com/p/gyp/ gyp] is a project-file-generation tool that can be used to generate `.vcproj` and `.sln` files (and `.xcodeproj`, etc.). It has a much easier to read format than `.vcproj`, and might be more easily modified by hand than `.vcproj` files. The Chromium port is already using `gyp`, so we'd have some extra help in maintaining the files (assuming we could share `gyp` files with them). If we switched Mac to using `gyp`, too, then we'd really reduce the likelihood of someone forgetting to add a new file to a `.vcproj`.