[webkit-dev] Origyn BAL abstraction for WebKit: branch request

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Nov 12, 2007, at 3:03 AM, Jean-Charles VERDIE (Pleyo) wrote:

> Dear webkit stakeholders
>
> Back in july, Pleyo announced a new port of Webkit, not onto a  
> specific platform but over an Abstraction Layer that we called OwBAL  
> and which lets us address specific needs which do not perfectly fit  
> with the "platform" approach. Actually, our goals are to be able to  
> adapt WebKit not to a platform, but a set of libraries which can be  
> all-but-one identical, or completely different, or whatever.  
> Platform approach makes sense when porting to a comprehensive  
> environment, but it does not address our needs. So that platform  
> made big parts of the code redundant for us.
>
> Today, our abstraction code is almost mature and we'd like to move  
> it back to webkit.org. I believe that since our changes are quite  
> intrusive in many parts of webcore, jscore and platform, a branch  
> could be a good start where we could put the code so that we can  
> start advocating some (if not all) of our changes to eventually end  
> up being part of webkit trunk.
>
> Can anyone tell me how to process?

I am ok with this in principle. However, in general, being on a branch  
doesn't align you with the project as closely as staying in sync with  
the trunk. In particular, there is still the risk of ending up  
diverging from the core. In particular the S60 port may take a long  
time to merge up to a more modern baseline. Still, it is probably  
better to be on a branch in webkit.org than in a completely separate  
repository, in terms of code sharing and communication.

Are there any other opinions? Besides being a meta-port, what specific  
platforms and libraries does your version of WebKit target?

Does anyone working on OWB already have SVN access?

Regards,
Maciej