[sldev] Webkit versus Second Life

[Soft]

Watching an Apple Safari/Webkit developer intro talk, they did
something pretty cool: They demonstrated that you can fetch and build
Webkit using nothing but your mouse. They assume you have the
developer tools and subversion installed. The rest is su-and-say
enough that you can just copy and paste three lines from the browser.
One to do the svn fetch, one to build, and one to launch the built
app.

We're pretty far away from that. We rely on a handful of libraries
that we can't provide on our own. We need some extra development tools
installed. We have library and artwork bundles apart from the source
bundle. We have separate steps for configuring and for building. An
awful lot of new devs get lost somewhere in the process.

Of all the above, if we were going to focus on knocking out just one
step next, which do you think would be most valuable? Which is the
highest hurdle?


Another cool thing they do is making sure the nightly builds are
completely stand-alone. Testing a build is as simple as unpacking a
zip file and running a file in the contents - no installers permitted,
no writing to files outside that directory. The idea is that it's
possible to keep an array of nightlies and binary chop through
versions to find regressions. Mac and Linux are pretty much at this
stage. Would this be preferable for Windows BSI nightlies?