[webkit-dev] Changes in QtWebKit development

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Thursday 26 September 2013, Andreas Kling wrote:
> 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?
> 

I would love to, but I do not think it is going to happen. Quite honestly I 
wasn't sure I would be able to pull a new branch for 5.2 off, since older 
Linux (gcc 4.4), all windows builds and especially old OS X (10.6) were not 
building WebKit2 when I started. I got it working, but it the work to unroll 
unnecessary compiler features and library dependencies is just going to get 
harder from now on (if anyone want a patch to remove the C++11 requirement 
from WebKit2 late July, I have one).  If a new branch is made from WebKit 
trunk in the future would likely only be limited to specific platforms, and 
therefore not suited as a module shipped with Qt, but as an optional upgrade.

> 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.
> 

We all know what happens when a webkit port works on a branch. In theory it 
shouldn't be a problem, but as you know it didn't work for the N9 browser 
branch in Nokia, it didn't even work for the iOS branch at Apple!

So based on observations, I believe to be part of the project and able to 
commit upstream you must live upstream.

Best regards
`Allan Jensen