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

[Levi Weintraub]

Speaking from my time at HP/Palm working on webOS, there was always a desire
to upstream the project particularly to avoid missing all the source
reorganization going on in the main tree. Unfortunately, there's a large bar
of entry to upstream a new WebKit port, and we never had the resources to
make that happen...


On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 9:09 AM, Charles Pritchard <chuck at jumis.com> wrote:

>  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>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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>
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