[webkit-dev] Changes in QtWebKit development

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Saturday 14 September 2013, Andreas Kling wrote:
> On Sep 14, 2013, at 11:24 AM, Allan Sandfeld Jensen <kde at carewolf.com> 
wrote:
> > That said, in all likelihood the Qt port will not remain part of WebKit
> > forever, ...
> 
> (This being the main reason.)
> 
> Since you already know you’re eventually going to leave, you could just
> move to a branch sooner rather than later. It’s unreasonable to expect
> WebKit to accommodate a port that has no forward-looking interest in the
> project.
> 
We do have a  branch tagged and being prepared for 5.2. It was taken before 
the FTL merge and the following switch to require C++11 in all of the project. 
It will be very hard branch again after that point since we support 2-3 year 
old platforms by default, and the Webkit project want to move to using the 
latest and greatest compilers.

We also were not expecting much accommodation. Our continued engagement should 
mainly be seen as a gesture, we want to slowly pull out our code and help 
clean up after ourselves. We don't have as many resources as Google so we can 
not do that in just a few days, and since I am the one going to do so, I 
prefer to tie up some loose ends and land the patches for review that affect 
all of WebKit instead of just dropping everything and leaving. 

If you feel the Qt port is a burden and in the way of major refactorings you 
want to do, we could set a more specific time schedule for the transition. On 
the Digia side we are just naturally hesitant due to emotional attachment to 
WebKit and bad experience from the Nokia days with dropping a project before 
its replacement is ready ;)

Kind regards
`Allan Jensen