[webkit-dev] [Fwd: Re: Announcing new port: EFL]

[Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

Hi all, sorry about  the post to forward, possibly breaking the mail
thread, but I was not subscribed to the list. Find below some
comments:

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Leandro Pereira <leandro at profusion.mobi> wrote:
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Leandro Pereira <leandro at profusion.mobi>
> To: webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
> Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:44:24 -0300
> Subject: Re: [webkit-dev] Announcing new port: EFL
> Eric,
>
> On Mon, 2010-02-22 at 11:19 -0800, Eric Seidel wrote:
>> I have a few questions (and I assume others are curious to the answers as well):
>> - Who maintains this port?  (Samsung I assume.)
>
> ProFUSION and Samsung.
>
>> - Is this an active port? (Are there plans for the EFL contributors to
>> work upstream?)
>
> Yes, we want to work directly with upstream. ProFUSION itself will keep
> working on it even if contracts are over, as it is a great component for
> EFL and we invest a good amount of work in EFL-related technologies as
> it is part of our service offerings.
>
> I am doing the cleanups required by the upstream task, merge of GTK+'s
> and EFL's build system, and will do further works on unifying both GTK
> +'s and EFL's codebases. There are other people working on this port,
> however:
>
> - Rafael Antognolli <antogolli at profusion.mobi>, working on the port
> since August last year, did a great amount of work to get optimizations
> and fixes.
> - Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri <barbieri at profusion.mobi>, core developer of
> EFL, rewrote the WebKit/efl/ based on initial port by INdT. Is now the
> manager and internal ProFUSION reviewer.
> - Lucas De Marchi <lucas.demarchi at profusion.mobi>, working to fill the
> gaps, like missing APIs in WebCoreSupport.
> - Raphael Kubo  da Costa <kubo at profusion.mobi>, worked on alternative
> backing store scaling to speed up zooming in mobile systems.
>
>> - Does the EFL port have a DumpRenderTree implementation?  (And if so,
>> can it run the LayoutTests?  What percentage pass?)
>
> Not yet, but we'll surely add it in future as we want to have automated
> tests just like Qt.

I'm quite sure Samsung people will step in and confirm their
commitment to the success and continuation of the EFL port, as they
are already doing with the core EFL itself. Browser engine, as we are
all aware, is a critical component of any modern system and thus of
high interest to them.

But Samsung is not alone in this port. I can say about ProFUSION and
Enlightenment, as I'm both owner of former and core developer of
later.

Enlightenment developers always liked and supported the WebKit-EFL
port, even the first public release did by INdT got patches and
applications developed around it. For one, we got "ewww" browser from
Calaos guys, then I created "eve" based on it -- it lived in E SVN for
a while, just dropped recently as we ended changing the public API
completely (and for good).   After WebKit-EFL lands completely, it is
planned to have Elementary (our widget set/toolkit,
http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki/Elementary) widget encapsulating
it... that will likely boost its usage.

ProFUSION is about development and services, with the differentiation
factor being EFL support. Our plans regarding WebKit-EFL are quite
longstanding, even before being contracted by Samsung to do this port
we planned to have a WebKit-EFL component in EFL.   Of course
Samsung's support helps supporting it, but even without them we do
plan to continue investing manpower in this port as it is a key
technology for our developments and services.

I hope this are bit more clear now. This is not a drop-and-run ;-)

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
http://profusion.mobi embedded systems
--------------------------------------
MSN: barbieri at gmail.com
Skype: gsbarbieri
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