[webkit-efl] Deprecating WebKit EFL 1

[Cedric BAIL]

Hello,

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 1:10 AM, Christophe Dumez
<christophe.dumez at intel.com> wrote:
>> There are lots of concerns from EFL developers (me included) on how
>> the development of WebKit-EFL is being done. The API of webkit2 even
>> not being fully supported by EFL, as contrary to webkit1. There's only
>> 1 developer that seemed to care and started to send patches to
>> elm-web, so webkit2 can be fully supported.
>>
>> No surprise there was feedback asking for clarifications and why a
>> simpler api couldn't be used. Now you come and say WebKit1 is being
>> deprecated.  -1000 here, until the day webkit2 gets fully supported in
>> EFL and you start to interact more with EFL devs.
>
> The proposed date for dropping WK1 EFL from upstream is 8 month away. I think this
> gives a reasonable amount of time for people currently relying on WK1 EFL to port their code to WK2 EFL.
> If anything, this should motivate people to make sure all the components work with WK2 EFL.

8 months is clearly to short from now is clearly to short. 8 months
after WK2 EFL API is stabilized and "released" (I mean by that, that
any API/ABI break of it will be forbidden). Then you can consider
dropping WK1 EFL. Announcing that you will drop WK1 EFL when WK2 EFL
is not even stable, is not a proper move in my opinion.

Upstream EFL does use WK1 EFL in the 1.7.x branch, that will be used
by E17 release later this year. This means that all distribution that
do want to package EFL with a stable release for E17 will be depending
on WK1 EFL. You can stop development, only do bugfixes, but removing
it is clearly not a smart move here.

> About interaction with EFL developers, I don't think we have any problem answering questions related
> to WebKit EFL (via this mailing list or the IRC channel) or fix bugs filed upstream against WebKit EFL.

Yes, you have. I am aware of the move to WK2 EFL since less than 3
weeks. If some nice Samsung guy didn't try to help EFL upstream to
move away of WK1 EFL we wouldn't be even have any proper information
and code here. At this point, the WebKit EFL people need to get more
involved with EFL. It's not a matter of answering question, it's about
using the same tool and do that efficiently ! If we don't share
infromation more effectively, this kind of thread is going to repeat.
I strongly encourage every developer of WK EFL to join e-devel mailing
list and ping people there when there is important subject to bring in
(like new dependencies, feature request, ...). I am now subscribed to
this mailing list and will try to keep reading it, but that's not
enough. WK EFL team should get more engadged with EFL developer in
general.

As a side note a fact, that I don't know more than half of the people
in this thread, means you are not really visible in EFL community.
That's bad also. We have an EFL dev day next week in Barcelona, I hope
to see and meet some of you guys there.

>> On a side node, being a former contributor to webkit-efl, I shrugged
>> with recent webkit revisions in which we refuse do depend and use EFL
>> infra but we are now depending on several third-party non-released
>> libraries. No matter what jhbuild can do for devs we should be using
>> more of EFL, not less.
>
> I'm not sure what you're referring to. From what I've seen, we are relying more and more
> on EFL, not the opposite.

If that's true, that's a bad move and evolution here. But that should
be part of another thread of discussion.

Regards,
-- 
Cedric BAIL