Am 04.11.2011 03:44, schrieb Alex Wilson:
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Ryan Leavengood<leavengood@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:So I'm emailing here to get suggestions on what we should do next. I REALLY, REALLY don't want to maintain our own repo, especially with all the Haiku code removed from the main WebKit repo. But I suspect I or we will need to contribute more to WebKit and stay active for them to let us back.My impression from that thread (with its talk of low barrier to entry) is that it shouldn't be a problem to add the Haiku port back in. Just explain that our old split repo approach was making things difficult, and as kallisti5 said, mention that there were patches written, but not upstreamed (which is worth something!). It might help to mention that we're willing to make a buildbot a priority (I'll work on this if nobody else wants to).. Anyway, once I'm done with the layout stuff (finishing it off right now whenever I have the time), I want to start working on WebKit/Web+, and it seems that there is interest from others. With a bit of effort, we should be able to sustain the WebKit port with minimal burden on the upstream developers.
It would be awesome if you could try and help maintain the port once you finished your work on the Layout Kit. The biggest problem is to have someone focus on this. While I was contracted, I could do that and regularily tried to improve or update our patches in the WebKit bugtracker, plus create new ones. At around the same time last year, it was already proposed by the WebKit developers to remove our port due to inactivity. I was still on their mailing list back then and objected, telling them I have much more patches in the pipeline, which was/is absolutely true. Only the smallest part of my work was even prepared as a patch, yet.
As Ryan said, having our port in the official repo just creates work for the WebKit developers, since they try to keep our port updated. Without Haiku build bot, they do so in the blind. To make this extra effort worthwhile, there would have to be a person who continuously works with the WebKit project. Until then, maintaining our own repository should work just fine. It also shields us from the insane pulse of the WebKit project. This is important as long as work is still focused on getting things to work at all. When you constantly update, you never know if a problem you see is because your own code is still broken, or if it just happens to be a temporary problem in WebKit in general.
Best regards, -Stephan
