[webkit-dev] Is the wxWidgets port maintained?

[Benjamin Poulain]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 6:17 PM, Kevin Ollivier <kevino at theolliviers.com>wrote:

> To be honest, I think I know more about the wx port, and would probably be
> better able to cleanly remove it from the tree, than you would. As I've
> said from the start, I'll remove it if that's what people want, but I do
> think the severity of this problem is being exaggerated, and going from
> posing the question of project status to giving a one week eviction notice
> in less than 24 hours seems a bit rash to say the least. I wish I could get
> paid good money to spend my time doing things like creating patches to
> remove inactive files from source trees. :) As it stands, though, this
> wasn't exactly on my TODO list for this week as of, say, this morning, and
> I do have plenty on it right now. I'm already even regretting how much time
> I've put into this discussion.
>

I am sorry, I should have given more context.

There is visibly a growing discontent in the community about the cost
imposed from small ports. Just two weeks ago, there were 2 threads
discussing the cost of "peripheral ports".
I am convinced a part of this is technical. The project has not changed its
policies while the number of ports was growing. While duplicated code and
interfaces was okay when there were only 3 ports, it has become a pain when
we have 7+ ports to updates.

This weekend, I was looking at technical ways to reduce the problems, and
the wx port looks like one of the issue. Everyone with whom I have
discussed that today seems to agree.

You said yourself "As things stand, I'd not only be okay with, but actually
prefer, that no other port maintainers do anything to try and fix the wx
build.". The best way to achieve that and reduce the maintenance for
everyone is to have the wx port developed outside the tree. Which is why I
propose to do the change.

To think, it was wx and GTK that started the whole WebKit porting
> experiment in the first place, thanks to the gracious help of the WebKit
> community, and particularly Eric, and now I feel like the project can't
> push me out the door fast enough. ;-)
>
> Please be patient, I will take care of it, but I doubt I will manage it
> this week.
>

In his email "WebKit Wishes", Eric said "It can’t be the job of the core
maintainers to care about all the peripheral ports which contribute very
little core code."
I also think it is just not fair having hundred of peoples taking care of
updating the port.

There is no rush to move the port out of the tree. I suggested this week in
order to have a definite timeline but there is no urgency. If there is
interest in the wxWidgets community to make the port actively developed,
that would be a great solution too.
You do not have to do the change by yourself. I'd be happy to start if that
helps you, and you can refine the changes.

Cheers,
Benjamin
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