[webkit-dev] Pulling together on WebKit Mobile

[Mike Emmel]

I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks is the lack of a shared
workspace for development.

The patch approach is good for bugs but falls apart when multiple
people from different organizations are working on new code.

However I like the review process in place before code is included in
the main tree.

Git with its builtin ability to chain repositories easily makes a
sensible choice for solving this problem.

So I would like to propose that we have a public git repository set up
that has fairly lax commit rules.
This repo can track the main repository and we should bugs to
reference git branches in the development repository.

This will allow us to publicly stage development for inclusion into
the main repo and make it easy to upgrade bug reports as the head
changes.

And most importantly it would move a lot of intermediate development
out of private repositories and into
a sharable public arena.

Next it gives people a work history that can be reviewed when
considering allowing main repo privileges.


I think this approach will allow us to keep the main repository and
tree clean and foster the churn that makes open source development fun
and exciting.

Contributing to webkit is not a fun and exciting process at the moment.



On Jan 11, 2008 10:38 AM, Alp Toker <alp at atoker.com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> There's a lot of mobile WebKit expertise in different organisations and
> from various individuals, but we haven't really done much to put it all
> in one place so far.
>
> Would you be interested in sharing your findings, internal documentation
> and patches?
>
> Some things I'd like to see:
>
>   * Build fixes for various lightweight toolchains integrated into TOT
>
>   * Documentation of optional defines used in the WebCore loader and
> elsewhere, like LOW_BANDWIDTH_DISPLAY and MOBILE
>
>   * Build instructions made public (Scratchbox, cross-compilation etc.)
>
>   * Compiler flags
>
>   * Bug workarounds for different architectures and toolchains
>
> I'd love to see what Naiem's team is finding and fixing in the GTK+
> port, what tweaks the iPhone and Android engineers are using, and the
> lightweight libc fixes from Peter, and Collabora's findings on the Nokia
> internet tablets all in one place.
>
> When patches get merged, the WebKit team will help you maintain them so
> contributing code can help reduce the burden of maintaining ports and
> build fixes out-of-tree.
>
> I have some material I've built up privately in the last year on ARM
> including benchmarks and patches that I'd like to start sharing too.
>
> I do think we can get more done if we work together here. I've set up a
> wiki page -- please edit this with your findings and suggestions:
>
>    http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/wiki/Mobile
>
> You can register an account on the wiki here:
>
>    http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/webkit/register
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