[webkit-dev] New WebKit port to Haiku

[Ryan Leavengood]

Hello all,

As part of the Google Summer of Code I am mentoring a student named
Maxime Simon, who is resurrecting and continuing my port of WebKit to
the Haiku operating system (http://haiku-os.org). I originally did
this port in 2007, but stopped working on it until now. Obviously I
never had it committed to the WebKit tree.

As part of the GSoC project Maxime has recently updated my port and
got it building with the latest WebKit code (surprisingly it did not
take too long.) He created a bug
(https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26620) to add this code to
the WebKit repo. In his comments on that bug Eric Seidel asked that an
email be sent here introducing ourselves. I figured I would start and
let Maxime respond to this email if he wants.

To assuage Eric's concerns, Haiku will not be disappearing anytime
soon. The project has existed since 2001 and moves forward everyday
(though progress can be slow since we have a small team and a big
project: the recreation and continuation of the BeOS.) A huge part of
any modern operating system is a good web browser and while Haiku has
a port of Firefox, it does not have the speed and feel we want. Since
WebKit is fast, elegant and easy to port it was the ideal choice for
the engine behind our new web browser.

So it would be really great if our port could become an official one
in the WebKit tree :)

I sure hope that Maxime will stick around after the Summer of Code,
but in case he does not I will be sure to keep the Haiku WebKit port
updated. I think the people who ported Firefox to BeOS and then Haiku
will also want to help on this project. Since I plan to use Haiku as
my main OS and the WebKit browser as my main browser I will truly be
eating my own dogfood and it will be in my interest to keep it updated
and working well :)

-- 
Regards,
Ryan