[openbeos] Re: Introducing an Jam question to HAIKU Build system

"Ryan Leavengood" <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 12/27/06, Axel Dörfler <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > If that should be a permanent storage, we already have vendor 
> > branches
> > to put the verbatim packages under. If WebKit is done, I would 
> > guess
> > we'd be very interested to make it part of Haiku, anyway, so a 
> > 3rdparty
> > / wouldn't be used for that either.
> Well I can't predict the future of course, but I think the best bet
> for a future Haiku/WebKit relationship would be to keep a separate
> WebKit (it is quite a lot of source, almost as much as Haiku I
> suspect) which would be (hopefully) easy to download and build to
> produce libWebKit.so. Then on the Haiku side we would have maybe
> BHTMLView which uses libWebKit.so and then our browser source which
> again would use libWebKit.so.

While I would prefer libwebkit.so in this case, I don't see why we 
should separate the BHTMLView from the WebKit - we don't need to (and 
shouldn't IMO) make the Web Kit public; instead, we should create a new 
API that follows the Be style for it, and tightly wraps it.
I think we should add as little 3rd party APIs to Haiku as possible - 
that will only cause dependencies we don't want (just consider the next 
WebKit will break binary compatibility, and we now must include the old 
and the new library to maintain compatibility - that sounds a lot like 
adopting the "Linux dependency hell").

> From what I've seen the WebKit community seems friendly towards
> porting and making WebKit more portable in its core, so it is
> conceivable that after the needed work we could just download the
> WebKit source from their repository and quickly build a Haiku/BeOS
> version. This way we can be sure to make use of improvements to the
> Mac and Linux versions of WebKit without complicated merging and
> patching of a separate branch in our source tree.

If it's part of Haiku, it must be built on a "jam haiku" - if that 
causes downloading the sources once I don't care, but there shouldn't 
be any extra work. We also must make sure we only include stable 
versions into Haiku, of course.

Bye,
   Axel.

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