On 5/25/13 12:45 PM, Mike Gilbert wrote:
> You may see small (~60 seconds) difference when compiling Chromium due
> to faster target dependency resolution.

You may also see faster builds in general because ninja is designed for
very high degree of parallelization as compared to make.

>> From a maintainer's perspective, shouldn't the user be able to choose
>> whether ninja or make is used and not the developer? Or does ninja
>> really work out for the majority in a way nobody would complain?

Why would the user want to choose the build system?

> The choice of build system should be transparent to the user. However, I
> have no strong personal objection to making it configurable.

The build system of choice actually is completely transparent to the user...

>> From an upstream perspective, would it be problematic if people use
>> make instead of ninja; or wouldn't it translate into problems upstream
>> has to resolve? (To me, using ninja instead of make sounds like using
>> llvm instead of gcc; correct me if I'm wrong, I'm fairly new to ninja.)
>>
> So long as GYP supports emitting makefiles as well as ninja build files,
> I don't think this will be a problem.
> 
> For Gentoo, I believe phajdan.jr simply chose to switch to ninja to more
> closely mimic the normal upstream build process.

One part is indeed that the upstream default changed to ninja, but
another one is that makefile support will be going away. The faster we
can switch to ninja and fix any bugs resulting from that, the better.

Let me repeat: Chromium project will be dropping support for generating
makefiles, making ninja the only supported build system on Linux.

Paweł