[webkit-dev] Changes in QtWebKit development

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Monday 30 September 2013, Dirk Schulze wrote:
> 
> I would not necessarily disagree with the problem of upstreaming work. But
> you said that most likely you wouldn't be able to branch WebKit anymore
> because of the compiler requirement.  At least for Qt. Do you have other
> interests in QtWebKit beside the integral part of Qt so that it makes
> sense for you to maintain the port further?
>
Right now we have no specific interests, but it can potentially be valuable 
both for Open Source projects such as KDE, or for developers that need an more 
up-to-date QtWebKit for specific products.

> Another question that is just partly related to WebKit but more curiosity. 
> Qt is deep integration into WebKit. We have (had?) a lot of Qt specific
> code in core WebCore to support QtXML and other things. Blink already
> stated that they would not accept such deep interventions in their
> platform. Is all that not important for you anymore? Can you operate with
> libxml2 and other libraries from now on? If that is the case, can't we
> limit the Qt specific code to just /platform/qt and remove all other Qt
> specific dependencies from WebCore?
> 
Some of this is exactly the reason we want to keep Qt WebKit alive. It may 
never be possible to fully replace Qt WebKit with anything Blink/Chromium 
based. Though I am mostly thinking of graphics and networking stuff. On QtXml 
you mentioned, I already removed it from trunk a week ago, libxml2 was 
recommended on Linux, and QtXml only required on Windows, so it was redundant 
code. I was also going to remove the Windows support in WebKit2, but someone 
beat me to it.

Other features that may be removable now if no other port wants to use them 
are Mac and Windows support in WebCore/plugins (WebKit1 nsplugin support). The 
Mac implementation was broken for several months before we discovered it up to 
a release, so I doubt it was used by anyone but us. Also the windows 
implementation of GraphicsSurface is now dead code, it was used for 
accelerated WebGL over WebKit2.

Regards
`Allan Jensen