[webkit-dev] Open Design beyond Open Source

[Mike Emmel]

On 2/17/07, Adam Roben <aroben at apple.com> wrote:
> On Feb 16, 2007, at 3:41 PM, Mike Emmel wrote:
> > What would apple need to do ?
> >
> > 1.) Simply make a better web page so people can write a small
> > paragraph about their work and provide a link to a website or
> > repository.
>
>     This seems like a perfect job for our wiki at http://
> trac.webkit.org/. In fact, our wiki already contains information
> about how to build the Windows and GDK ports, and is just waiting for
> more information to be added about these and other ports.
>
> > The problem with number 3 is right now a number of WebKit ports exist
> > that are not part of the main tree so the SVN branch solution has
> > already in a sense failed. I'm aware of at least 4 WebKit ports not
> > part of WebKit SVN.  I don't think doing nothing is working. Instead
> > the fragmentation you don't want to happen has already happened.
> > I have no idea how many others a out there I'm sure their are more.
>
>     This is not so much a failure of Subversion as it is a failure of
> communication. To the best of my knowledge, very little if any
> information about these other ports has been communicated to the
> WebKit community other than a few recent emails to this mailing list.
> Those ports that have made themselves known to the community (S60,
> Qt, GDK) seem to be having no trouble living within the webkit.org
> Subversion repository, either as a branch (in S60's case), or as part
> of the trunk (as Qt and GDK are). The S60 port is slowly moving
> towards being included in the trunk, and this seems to be the model
> that gives the most benefit to everyone. What makes this process
> difficult is when ports are developed outside of the community
> process and then try to integrate themselves back in later. There's
> lots of room in the WebKit community for ports, and we encourage
> anyone working on or considering starting a port to join us in
> #webkit and on this mailing list so that we may figure out how we can
> best work together.
>
> -Adam
>
Subversion does not meet my needs I'm not asking for access to the
subversion repository
either on the head or as a branch.
Git is working great for my needs I'm really happy with it and if
subversion is working for you git should to.

Also I'm not the only one from what I can tell subversion worked for 3
ports and failed to meet the needs of at least 4 and probably more.

Actually their are five ports. QT OSX Gdk Windows and S60 you forgot
the windows port. Of the five the windows port and gdk port are not
progressing that well and don't have a lot of developer support. The
QT S60 and OSX ports have a lot of developers with commit access and
these port are proceeding so its 3 live ports and 2 half dead  ones.

Here is the link of what you have to go through to commit now.

http://webkit.org/coding/contributing.html

People wanting to do a new port are not going to go through this long
trial program just to commit in fact that have not.  The KDE team has
pre-existing interest and both OSX and S60 are commercial.  The  two
true open source ports gdk/windows plus the wx widget port have
basically been failures so far.

So from and opens source perspective webkit is not a smashing success
in drawing in the open source community only the KDE team has really
contributed and they were the original developers. The S60 port also
has a history of working with KHTML before webkit was made
a open project.

In my book this makes WebKit a failed open source project  so far.

I suspect if you moved the gdk ports and windows ports to git
repositories and allowed  and easy way for developers to register
these ports would become active. Your going to have to pretty much
allow open commit access to get enough developers to get these ports
going.
Git does not work that great on windows and I don't know how to
federate svn repositories.
But if you want these ports to succeed your going to have to do an
open enrollment to get a community going. In any case the lack of a
vibrant community to supporting either the windows port or gtk should
be of concern.

Finally I was asking either to do a simple wiki description of adopt
support for git.

I'm happy enough to do a wiki page and I'll continue to submit patches
via bug reports.