[webkit-dev] Ports and Forks

[Mike Emmel]

Lately it seems a lot of people working on various ports forks and
other variants of webkit have become more vocal.

The problem is that most of the work is not readily accessible to the
webkit community because it is stored in private repositories. This
makes the sharing of concepts ideas and code difficult.
I understand the need to keep a robust functional head for stable
webkit development but wonder if it would be possible to set up a
solution for allowing all the other work going on with webkit to be
made available.

I would like to propose the following.

Secondary repositories are created per major project. As these
projects mature or fix bugs that are in the head or even make
structural changes that are of interest the code is migrated and
brought into the main repository.


A number of tools exist for tracking a SVN repository with a second repository.

I use git and git-svn.

I favor git/git-svn over other tools since it allows the secondary
repositories to work as peers
making it easy to share code amongst branches before committing to the
main repository.
The advantage is that the branches and forks can be normalized to
reduce the amount of conflicting patch submissions for the main
repository.

Next since git is peer to peer multiple git repositories for each
variant are easy to create.

Other approaches are possible.

And example use case would be to add E4X support to WebKit the most
interesting approach is integration of tamarin into webkit since this
would provide both a jit and E4X.

By setting up a associated repository this work would be accessible to
all interested parties and once stable it could be integrated into the
main repository.