[webkit-dev] Changes in QtWebKit development

[Andreas Kling]

On Sep 25, 2013, at 12:40 PM, Allan Sandfeld Jensen <kde at carewolf.com> wrote:

> 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.

So you are saying that you'll never branch QtWebKit from WebKit trunk again?

> 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. 

Google did not clean up after themselves, see:

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024388.html

"Adam and Eric offered to do some of this cleanup, but I think it's healthier
for people who will continue to be a part of WebKit to decide what gets cleaned
up, and execute on the plan.”

I think this should be handled the same way.

> 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 ;)

It’s commendable that you want to land your platform-agnostic patches before
withdrawing from the project, but assuming your last branch point is already
set, I don’t see why this necessitates keeping the Qt platform code around.

Your "emotional attachment" is nothing but EWS bots and rebaselines to me.

-Andreas