[webkit-dev] Distribute to 10.3?

[Darin Adler]

On Jun 20, 2005, at 11:04 AM, Robert Fischer wrote:

> at the moment I am writing an application which heavily depends on  
> DOM.

The DOM features are in the OS X 10.3.9 update. If you can depend on  
10.3.9, you can ship a 10.3-compatible version of your application.

> To make it run on 10.3, too, my idea is to distribute WebKit  
> frameworks together with my app. Is this permitted? I did not found  
> any license agreements on webkit.darwin.org.

The license agreement is in the code. WebKit/LICENSE and WebCore/ 
LICENSE-* have the relevant licenses.

But aside from what the license agreement allows, we recommend  
against building a copy of the WebKit frameworks and distributing  
them with your Mac OS X application, because of the various technical  
hurdles involved. It's quite likely your application will break with  
various system changes.

To give  just one example, since various other frameworks use the  
WebKit, your copy of the WebKit will be used by frameworks within  
your application too, not just your application. And there's no way  
to be sure which SPIs those frameworks might be using, or guarantee  
that an update to one of those other frameworks might start using an  
SPI your WebKit doesn't have.

> Besides this legal issue: has anybody got WebKit compiled on 10.4  
> (with MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET 10.3) to run on 10.3? My test app  
> complains about missing references, e.g. "WebKit undefined  
> reference to _kCGImageSourceShouldPreferRGB32".

No, I don't think anyone has TOT compiling on 10.3 yet, although we  
didn't remove the various Panther-specific ifdefs and code paths yet.  
Building on 10.4 and running what's built on 10.3 would be yet  
another challenge, and that's something we've never done before in  
the history of the WebKit project.

     -- Darin