Build node-webkit, electron from source

[matthewbauer]

Both node-webkit and electron are just being downloaded from binary tarballs. It would be great if we could use the outputs of "chromium" to create a "chromiumcontent" output that could be used by these two frameworks as inputs.

TODO

• package "chromiumcontent"
• move "node-webkit" to source based build
• move "electron" to source based build
• move "atom" to source based build
• move "bracket" to source based build
• move "vscode" to source based build

Related

issue #6689

[Zimmi48]

It would be great indeed if vscode could be built from source because it is currently a non-free package (because the binaries are non-free) while, if built from source, it would be a free package (because the source code in under MIT license).

[lukateras]

I could do this if someone would lend me computing power.

[matthewbauer]

@yegortimoshenko

I could do this if someone would lend me computing power.

If you ask on IRC someone might be able to set up a Hydra jobset for you...

/cc @LnL7

[LnL7]

Any idea how long these would take to build?

[lukateras]

When I've built Chromium on my laptop with Intel i7-2677M CPU, it took around 24 hours. On Hydra, Electron should take about the same time to build as Chromium, as Node.js is relatively small, and Electron's own code should be negligible.

[ShamrockLee]

This is still important for me.

[gebner]

still important

[ShamrockLee]

This is still important in the long run.

[fee1-dead]

not stale.

[artemist]

I'm looking at building electron from source. It looks like the most complicated part is actually downloading the source code, since it wants you to use gclient, which download a lot of binary dependencies. The easiest way around this may be to reimplement the cloning parts of gclient in a simpler script.

If I don't find a way to optimize the git downloads it will probably also involve dowloading over 50GiB of objects, though I think googlesource lets you download archives of revisions.