[webkit-dev] Ports and Forks

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Feb 15, 2007, at 7:01 AM, Mike Emmel wrote:

> 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.

Anyone is welcome to set up their own public repository, but we would  
instead recommend using the main public repository, using an SVN  
branch if necessary. This also makes it easy to merge between  
branches if needed.

> 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.

This is an example of the kind of project that would be better done  
on a branch than in a separate repository (if it were desirable at all).

Regards,
Maciej