[webkit-dev] What is an "active port"? [WAS: Do you maintain OS(WINCE)?]

[Geoffrey Garen]

Responding to a few issues at once:

On Sep 14, 2011, at 12:50 PM, Adam Barth wrote:

> One of the things I admire about the WebKit project is that
> historically the project has been very inclusive.  One common thread
> that's woven through a number of recent discussions is that folks feel
> we've taken on too much complexity and that it's harder to make
> fundamental improvements to the engine.  Maybe it's time to adjust
> that balance slightly, but I hope we adjust our behavior deliberately.

Agreed. I think we can adjust toward putting more onus on port maintainers a step at a time, and see how things go. 

It may be a long-shot, but I really do believe that putting more onus on port maintainers has a chance to make WebKit *more* inclusive, not less, by bringing port maintainers into the fold of regular WebKit development.

On Sep 14, 2011, at 1:00 PM, Patrick Gansterer wrote:

> IMO most of the "is active" questions come with a "when do we remove the old code/port from trunk" question. That's not very cool to hear after the "hard" upstreaming work. But that's only my personal view.

I'm sorry that you keep getting this question, especially from me. :)

On Sep 14, 2011, at 1:00 PM, Patrick Gansterer wrote:

> More interesting questing is: How do "part time" maintainers get "informed" about fundamental changes? I'd prefer cc'ing on a bug which might break a build. So it's possible for the maintainer to try to build with the patch locally and implement the missing parts. At least for me it's easier to fix compiler errors than answering questions about a possible build break on webkit-dev. ;-)

I think some combination of forewarning in Bugzilla bugs and email to webkit-dev is the right approach here. Hopefully, all active maintainers, by definition, keep up with webkit-dev email. Direct CC is a harder plan for me to work with, because I want to make sure that I get in touch will all interested port maintainers at once, even if I don't a priori know who they are.

On Sep 14, 2011, at 1:02 PM, Dirk Pranke wrote:

> Maybe we need a webkit-port-maintainers@ list that one could easily cc
> rather than trying to add people by hand?

Sounds helpful. Not sure exactly how it would work, though. (How would you add yourself to the list?)

On Sep 14, 2011, at 1:08 PM, Ryosuke Niwa wrote:

> Having said that, I think contributors should help maintaining ports that have bots on build.webkit.org or EWS bots.

To the extent that a bot can make certain kinds of fixes obvious, I think that core contributors should indeed make obvious fixes. However, I'm not convinced that having a bot should convey any special privileges beyond that. 

Geoff
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