Portfile for CEF: Build from source or pre-built binary?

[Jason Liu]

Hi everyone,

I'm working on writing a Portfile for the Chromium Embedded Framework
(CEF), and I have a question for the mailing list. The question is the
perennial one of: should the port be built from source, or should the port
download the pre-built binary distribution? In this particular case, I
don't think it's necessarily a question of how difficult or complex it is
to build from source; rather, I think it's a question of the resources
required to build from source.

If we were to build CEF from source, it would require downloading the
entire source code for both CEF itself and Chromium. On their website, CEF
states that building from source on a Mac requires "At least 16 GB of RAM
and 200 GB of free disk space" [1]. In addition, a full build from source
apparently takes "Approximately 4 hours with a fast internet connection
(100 Mbps) and fast build machine (2.4 GHz, 16 logical cores, SSD)" [2].

On the other hand, Spotify hosts the official pre-built binary
distributions of CEF [3]; the "standard distribution" seems to hover at
around 200 MB in size. If building from source takes that many resources, I
guess it's no wonder why Spotify (but not Google?) hosts pre-built binaries.

Thoughts? Opinions?

[1]
https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef/wiki/AutomatedBuildSetup.md#markdown-header-macos-configuration
[2]
https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef/wiki/MasterBuildQuickStart.md#markdown-header-mac-os-x-setup
[3] https://cef-builds.spotifycdn.com/index.html

-- 
Jason Liu
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