[webkit-dev] Proposal to update WebKitGTK dependency policy

[Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez]

On 17/02/2022 18:41, Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez via webkit-dev wrote:
> Personally I'm ok with this, since I usually error on the conservative
> side regarding updating dependencies. But I'm raising the topic to put
> things into perspective and to help having a debate.

It turns out this above opinion of mine doesn't reflect a consensus
opinion inside Igalia.

After sending the above e-mail, I talked with my colleagues at Igalia
(my failure for not doing that before) and it seems that we are not
happy with committing to support the libraries for such long amount of time.

On one hand we are afraid this can make upstream development slower.
On the other hand we have limited resources and supporting old libraries
is not part of our goals.


So would like to know whether RedHat plans to contribute to ensure that
the extended support would happen:

  - Which port(s) is RedHat interested in supporting? Only the GTK
    port, or both GTK and WPE?

  - Is RedHat willing to devote development time to work upstream on
    the goal of keeping WebKit working with older libraries?

  - Will buildbots be provided for RHEL, in the same way Igalia
    maintains Ubuntu LTS and Debian stable builders to catch issues?


In any case, we think that 3+2 of support is too much. We can maybe
agree on 3+1 (support each RHEL version until one year after the next
one, like we do with Debian/Ubuntu) or on just 3 (no extra year of
support), depending on how much RH is willing to help upstream.

If RH is not willing to assign resources to help upstream then we would
rather leave the current policy as is (no change to include RHEL in the
dependencies policy)

Regards.