[webkit-dev] Large Source Reorganizations By External WebKit Ports

[Charles Pritchard]

On 5/18/11 2:09 PM, Peter Kasting wrote:
> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Brent Fulgham <bfulgham at webkit.org 
> <mailto:bfulgham at webkit.org>> wrote:
>
>     Google
>     used this same approach with their Chromium port, the side effects of
>     which find us in year two (or three?) of the effort to merge those
>     changes back into the core WebKit archive.
>
>
> Um, what?  The Chromium port is fully upstreamed and has been for some 
> time.  I'm not sure what you're saying here.  We are not forked and in 
> fact have no support for building Chromium with anything other than 
> upstream WebKit.

And as a web app developer, I've been happy to push bug fixes into 
WebKit via Chromium bug reports.

I heard from RIM that they're working hard to get their fork back in 
line with WebKit upstream;
they've contributed a lot of work to WebKit upstream, but are not yet 
merged back in... That's what I heard.

I think Brent's question to the list may have some merit if looked at 
from a different perspective.
Let me try it... Peter: Are there any lessons learned about that process 
Chromium went through?

As a coder, I certainly see that fork and merge process as a normal 
process -- a company
forks from the upstream, works on the code base within their own 
product, and at some point
their use becomes mature and they're able to merge back in with the 
upstream.

Are there any insights to that process -- or even estimates -- such as 
-- it took us "x" months
once we had WebKit working for us, to get back to building directly with 
the upstream.

Little bits of information like that may be helpful to some WebKit vendors.


-Charles
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