[webkit-dev] Plans to fully merge the Android port

[Adam Barth]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Ariya Hidayat <ariya.hidayat at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I started to look into the state of the Android port/platform and the state in
>> WebKit. It appears to me that the Android team at Google has decided to use
>> the chromium tree as upstream (it might have changed with Android 3.0),...
>
> On a side note, Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is actually the beginning of
> Chromium as the base for the Android port. Check out
> honeycomb(-release) branch in
> http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/external/webkit.git;a=summary
> and it seems that it is using 9.0.597 for the base.
>
> Remains to be seen whether Android 2.4 (Ice Cream) uses the same
> strategy or just follows the previous 2.3.

I can't speak to any future plans for the Android port, but I can
offer the following information from the revision history.  About 6
months ago, I tried to remove the Android build system in Bug 48111.
At the time, Steve Block wrote:

----8<----
Android WebKit is pretty forked from upstream, but we do take regular
merges. These build files are pretty well maintained by people adding or
removing source files upstream and these changes do help us in performing
our merges.
[...]
I can send a patch to reinstate these files and to bring them up to date.
We'll also make more of an effort to keep them as up to date as possible,
given our current state of forking.
---->8----

Since then, WebCore/Android.mk has been modified 81 times, but only
once by someone who I recognized as being associated with the Android
port.  WebCore/platform/android has been modified a total of 23 times,
of which 4 patches where written by someone I recognize as being
associated with the Android port (most recently 5 months ago).

Adam