[webkit-dev] Merging the iOS port to svn.webkit.org (Re: WebCore and interlocking threads)

[Adam Barth]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Ojan Vafai <ojan at chromium.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 7:41 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi Peter,
>>
>> On Feb 9, 2013, at 3:48 PM, Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>>
>>> There are certainly pros and cons to merging. It would be great get
>>> input from the broader WebKit community on the tradeoff of merging sooner
>>> vs avoidance of weird legacy code in the main tree. In the meantime, we'll
>>> stick to merging things that are not overly controversial as much as we can.
>>>
>>
>> For what my opinion is worth (probably near zero for a lot of you), I
>> would like to see you guys merge sooner rather than later, even if it leads
>> to awkwardness that needs cleanup.  Over the years there has been a nonzero
>> amount of friction due to the iOS port not being upstreamed, and I think it
>> would be beneficial to WebKit as a whole to fix that sooner rather than
>> later.  And it seems more likely to me that "upstream first, then decide
>> how to re-architect as needed" is going to result in high-quality
>> discussions and designs, as opposed to "figure out in private how to
>> re-architect before upstreaming", which runs the risk of just never
>> bothering to upstream at all.
>>
>> There is real compromise, and perhaps humility, needed from all sides to
>> make such a task successful.  I am reminded of Eric's recent email where he
>> pleaded for more of an explicit effort to civility towards each other.
>>  Perhaps this is an opportunity for us to practice that effort.
>>
>>
>> I really appreciate you saying that. I feel the same way. For years we've
>> been saying that we need to fix N different things before upstreaming, and
>> in the end we concluded that it was just delaying us from upstreaming at
>> all. And we concluded that cleaning up some of the questionable choices in
>> the open would lead to a better final outcome.
>>
>
> +1. I think that allowing the V8 bindings into the tree is a fairly good
> analogy to this situation (although it's not exactly the same). The point
> is that it did put a burden on the rest of the project at the benefit of
> getting Chromium folk working on core code and giving the ability to
> discuss trade-offs more directly by looking at the code in question.
>

Ok.  I'm sold.  I suspect we'll want to move the iOS port off of
USE(WEB_THREAD), but I can see how it's better to do that work in trunk.  I
wonder if it would be worth using a name like USE(DEPRECATED_WEB_THREAD) to
discourage others from adopting this execution model.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to discuss this issue.

Adam
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