Monday, March 31, 2008

Problems with extraneous files

While trying to determine which files I should copy, rename and/or edit in order to create a clone of the Canvas tag renamed to WebOpenGL I found files whose extension I did not recognize. Among these were .idl, .mm, and .pro. I had already seen files which I knew were IDE specific such as Visual Studio project files. The task now was to determine whether the unknown file types were IDE specific or were necessary for the build system to work correctly. I did a Google search for these unknown file extensions and found some where needed by Visual Studio, such as .idl, while others remained mysteriously hard to determine. After spending quite sometime on this task I decided to ignore all known IDE specific files. I then directed myself to the WebKit Wiki where I found documentation on the Bakefile system. This is the tool used to build WebKit. After reading this documentation briefly I realized that the files mentioned did not match those in the source code. Therefore my next task is to determine which files are needed by the build system and include the appropriate entries in these files so that the WebOpenGL tag can be created correctly.