[wpe-webkit] Removing wpe-webkit-1.1 API version?

[Adrian Perez de Castro]

Hello Michael, all,

On Sat, 04 Mar 2023 12:16:29 -0600 Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at redhat.com> wrote:

> 2.0: This is new API version containing several breaking changes. It is 
> currently unstable but should become stable within the next two weeks 
> when WPE WebKit 2.40.0 is released. Uses libsoup 3.
> 
> 1.1: Old API version, uses libsoup 3
> 
> 1.0: Old API version, uses libsoup 2
> 
> I suspect nobody is actually using 1.1? Now that the 2.40 branch has 
> been created, can we get rid of it so we don't have three different API 
> versions in 2.42?

Some distributions (Arch, for example) which have been shipping libsoup3 for a
while have chosen to provide only packages with the 1.1 API, because they can
build Cog and GstWPE against the 1.1 API without trouble and they do not have
other packages depending on WPE WebKit. This being said, I expect they would
not have trouble moving over to the 2.0 API as long as Cog and GstWPE can be
built against it.

I think it should be doable to phase out the 1.1 API, consider it a step in
the transition to the 2.0 API, and be done with it.

> (Honestly, it would be nice to remove 1.0 as well. ;)

My impression regarding embedded deployments is that either they are still
in the 1.0 API because they haven't moved over to libsoup3, or that it
should not be a terrible amount of churn having to apply a few small code
rewrites to switch to the 2.0 API (for the sake of reference, while we do
not have a migration guide dedicated to WPE [1], the GTK port migration
guide gives a good idea of what are the changes.)

My personal proposal for the removal of the 1.x APIs would be:

  * Remove API 1.1 now, so it would not be available in 2.42 (October 2023),
    encouraging users of libsoup3 to migrate to the 2.0 API.

  * Keep API 1.0 until 2.44 (March 2024), so it would still be included
    in that version. This way we would leave time for libsoup2→libsoup3
	migrations (e.g. Buildroot, Yocto) until 2.46 (October 2024), which
	would ship only with the 2.0 API.

I expect controversy (if any) to be motivated by the completely removal of the
1.x APIs after branching for 2.44, depending on how the libsoup3 migrations
are going. Still, even if we reconsider the removal of the 1.0 API in one
year from now, it would be good to have a plan in this regard.

Do people think this is a reasonable timeline? Other ideas and discussion
are more than welcome =)

Cheers,
—Adrián

---
[1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=253641
[2] https://webkitgtk.org/reference/webkit2gtk/unstable/migrating-to-webkitgtk-6.0.html
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