On Tue, Mar 8 2022 at 03:01:04 PM +0100, Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez <clopez@igalia.com> wrote:
It turns out this above opinion of mine doesn't reflect a consensus opinion inside Igalia.
After sending the above e-mail, I talked with my colleagues at Igalia (my failure for not doing that before) and it seems that we are not happy with committing to support the libraries for such long amount of time.
Ah, alas. Well it's ultimately Igalia's choice, of course.
- Which port(s) is RedHat interested in supporting? Only the GTK port, or both GTK and WPE?
We ship WebKitGTK, libwpe, and wpebackend-fdo, but not WPE WebKit.
- Is RedHat willing to devote development time to work upstream on the goal of keeping WebKit working with older libraries?
Um, yes, of course nobody except me is likely to spend time to keep WebKit building on RHEL. The difference is I would be able to commit my changes upstream in the future, instead of keeping them downstream and rebasing them when they break. E.g. it looks like https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235367 will have to live downstream. If we had this policy, I would be able to land stuff like that upstream too. The main impact on other developers would be an increased wait before you can remove preprocessor guards that support older library versions. That could be annoying, but I don't think it will require too much time commitment.
- Will buildbots be provided for RHEL, in the same way Igalia maintains Ubuntu LTS and Debian stable builders to catch issues?
I'm not personally very concerned about whether we have upstream builders for RHEL, since fixing problems when they reach tarball releases is good enough for me. But yes, since you requested it, we can probably add upstream bots. (They would probably actually run CentOS Stream, not RHEL.) That will take some time, though, because I'm not currently working on it. In my previous mail, I said I would defer this proposal until we are ready with the requested bots. I do very much want to add more JSC cloop EWS, and I bet Red Hat infrastructure folks might find time to help with those. We can probably add some builders at the same time. But to keep timeline in perspective: I've been planning this for years, but have not yet started on it. :P
In any case, we think that 3+2 of support is too much. We can maybe agree on 3+1 (support each RHEL version until one year after the next one, like we do with Debian/Ubuntu) or on just 3 (no extra year of support), depending on how much RH is willing to help upstream.
Hm, I guess I'd better gratefully accept whatever I can get. I'll attempt to keep it working downstream for the full 3+2 years regardless. Regarding resources from Red Hat to help upstream: that's going to remain just me. Certainly I would handle any changes needed to keep WebKit working on RHEL. Beyond that, I'll continue to help out a bit here and there. I wouldn't expect to see major changes in my contribution habits. Michael