On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 10:56 AM, Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@gmail.com> wrote:
Actually regarding the 42,000 changesets: these have all come in the last year and a half (!!!!), and are almost as many changesets as ever came before in the current WebKit repo. This is exponential growth! How is a small port possibly suppose to stay up-to-date under those conditions? Of course this just means that WebKit is a vibrant project and you cannot be faulted for that, but I think with this onslaught of changes it may be time to reconsider past methods of keeping ports up-to-date. Adam tells me Google has two full-time engineers keeping the Chromium port up-to-date. I think there is room for improvement in this area.
As far as keeping ports up-to-date goes, it seems like (in my limited experience) there's roughly four kinds of changes you have to work about: changes to tests that require new baselines, changes to the build system (adding, renaming, deleting files), changes to platform-specific core functionality (usually o/s-specific hooks), and changes to platform functionality (e.g., webaudio). Hopefully we will start writing more and more tests as reftests, to address the first category. Moving to one of the existing cross-port build mechanisms like GYP or CMake would help. Changes to core platform code in the third category are hopefully pretty rare, and I think you're just out of luck for the fourth category, but hopefully they're done in a modular manner and at least easy to enable/disable for a while. I think the more feedback we can get on what sorts of things you do have to do to keep up to date, the better things will get. -- Dirk