Hermetic builds

[mrdimidium]

Hey. I noticed some inconsistency in the handling of C dependencies:

• glib and expat are installed as system packages;
• v8 is downloaded in build.zig but it is built in a dedicated task;
• iconv is downloaded (from a fork) in the Makefile;
• iconv/mimalloc/netsurf is built using the official make/cmake;
• ada/curl/mbedtls are built directly from build.zig.

For some dependencies the system clang is used, and for some zig cc, which can also create problems.

I don't think there's a perfect way, but it would be easier if all dependencies were delivered uniformly. For example, I was building a browser on Fedora and encountered a build failure if gcc was installed on the system (unless clang was explicitly specified for make).

What do you think about standardizing this? The simplest solution would be to switch to delivering dependencies through build.zig.zon and building with the system tooling (addSystemCommand, which runs make/cmake).

Here's what it might look like:

• all dependencies are loaded into build.zig.zon;
• small libraries are built locally (like libcurl now);
• complex systems (like netsurf) are built using their official tooling (taking into account the build type, dev/safe, valgrind, etc.);
• all of this is linked via linkLibrary so that zig can handle dependencies;
• instead of the system clang, zig cc is always used;
• building the browser is as simple as running zig build on any system.

In addition to more reliable and reproducible local builds (which would also lower the entry barrier for new contributors), this would significantly simplify packaging the browser in Linux repositories in the future.

Let me know if you are interested in PR on this.

[krichprollsch]

Hello @mrdimidium,

Thanks for the issue.
I agree w/ you, having an uniform way to build all the browser would be really better.

v8

We have an ongoing work to integrate v8 build into zig build: https://github.com/lightpanda-io/zig-v8-fork/tree/build-with-zig
But it's mostly calling the v8's commands from zig build. I don't think it's what your really mean about standardization.

One important thing to have in mind, we want to keep the ability to use a pre-build version of v8 to save time and resources building the browser, mostly for CI, nightly releases, ...

@mookums can your create a PR for build-with-zig, @mrdimidium feel free to review it and make comments for improvements.

netsurf/iconv/mimalloc

I would like to hold on work on netsurf/iconv/mimalloc for now, b/c it's something we are thinking to replace, so I don't want to put effort on it until we take a decision.

[mrdimidium]

Oh, the @mookums's V8 solution is truly radical!

Your solution definitely has its advantages (very low-level dependencies control), but it will potentially complicate upgrades to new versions.

I proposed a much simpler scheme: use build.zig.zon to download depot_tools and use gclient to download v8, install dependencies, and run the build.

Your solution will also require some modifications to make it cross-platform (DEPS automatically detects what's needed for the current system). But it depends on whether zig-v8-fork should be cross-platform or it is only for lightpanda and linux.