Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Kirsling, Ross]

No need for apology—I hugely appreciate the support on this, given the shrouded 
process of getting those ZIP files updated! :D

Ross

From:  on behalf of Brent Fulgham 
Date: Thursday, April 9, 2020 at 3:16 PM
To: Ryosuke Niwa 
Cc: "Kirsling, Ross" , "webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org" 

Subject: Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

Please note that Per Arne updated the Apple ZIP files to have the correctly 
aligned ICU libraries, so the Windows bots should have what they need.

I apologize for taking so long to complete that.

Thanks,

-Brent


On Apr 3, 2020, at 4:57 PM, Ryosuke Niwa 
mailto:rn...@webkit.org>> wrote:


On Fri, Apr 3, 2020 at 4:25 PM Kirsling, Ross 
mailto:ross.kirsl...@sony.com>> wrote:
Hi everybody,

Just sending out an email blast for visibility regarding 
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209694.

This patch:

  *   Upgrades the Mac ICU headers under Source/WTF/icu from ICU 55 to ICU 62, 
matching Mojave
  *   Introduces a minimum ICU version of 60.2 throughout the codebase, as 
required by GTK for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

As written in the ChangeLog, the immediate motivations are:

  1.  To properly establish a minimum ICU version for WebKit as a whole
(responding to a pain point identified in 
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209579)
  2.  To support the development of ECMA-402 Intl API features, which JSC is 
quite behind on
(and which often boil down to exposing ICU functionality to JavaScript)

The only remaining concern of which I am aware is that AppleWin’s ICU headers, 
stored in WebKitAuxiliaryLibrary.zip, need to be upgraded from ICU 49 to 62 (to 
match the lib files stored in WebKitSupportLibrary.zip). We do have a potential 
workaround for this (i.e. having CMake copy the Mac headers to 
WebKitLibraries/win) but it is feared that this may break Apple-internal builds 
and we would certainly like to avoid a revert if possible. Any help on this 
front would be greatly appreciated.

FWIW, I've been told that Brent / Per might be able to help you there but might 
need some more time due to other more urgent commitments.

- R. Niwa

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Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Brent Fulgham]

Please note that Per Arne updated the Apple ZIP files to have the correctly 
aligned ICU libraries, so the Windows bots should have what they need.

I apologize for taking so long to complete that.

Thanks,

-Brent

> On Apr 3, 2020, at 4:57 PM, Ryosuke Niwa  wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 3, 2020 at 4:25 PM Kirsling, Ross  > wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
>  
> 
> Just sending out an email blast for visibility regarding 
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209694 
> .
> 
>  
> 
> This patch:
> 
> Upgrades the Mac ICU headers under Source/WTF/icu from ICU 55 to ICU 62, 
> matching Mojave
> Introduces a minimum ICU version of 60.2 throughout the codebase, as required 
> by GTK for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
>  
> 
> As written in the ChangeLog, the immediate motivations are:
> 
> To properly establish a minimum ICU version for WebKit as a whole
> (responding to a pain point identified in 
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209579 
> )
> To support the development of ECMA-402 Intl API features, which JSC is quite 
> behind on
> (and which often boil down to exposing ICU functionality to JavaScript)
>  
> 
> The only remaining concern of which I am aware is that AppleWin’s ICU 
> headers, stored in WebKitAuxiliaryLibrary.zip, need to be upgraded from ICU 
> 49 to 62 (to match the lib files stored in WebKitSupportLibrary.zip). We do 
> have a potential workaround for this (i.e. having CMake copy the Mac headers 
> to WebKitLibraries/win) but it is feared that this may break Apple-internal 
> builds and we would certainly like to avoid a revert if possible. Any help on 
> this front would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> 
> FWIW, I've been told that Brent / Per might be able to help you there but 
> might need some more time due to other more urgent commitments.
> 
> - R. Niwa
> 
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Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Adrien Destugues]

>Also, sadly ICU does not maintain a stable API or ABI. So every 
>application and library using ICU would need to be rebuilt and updated 
>at the same time. Then the update would break any custom software that 
>users have using the system ICU. Such an update would go badly... 
>probably would wind up in tech news once people notice the breakage.
>

Icu can be built with all its abi inside a different namespace for each 
version, so that multiple versions can live side by side and even be loaded in 
the same process without conflicts. Are Linux distros not packaging it that 
way? It makes updates easier as the transition can be made more gradually, at 
least.

And it would make it possible to ship a newer icu with webkit, while not 
risking conflicts with the system provided one.

-- 
Adrien.  
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Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 2:48 pm, Michael Catanzaro 
 wrote:
Sometimes distros make exceptions (e.g. for WebKitGTK, which is 
special due to very high number of CVEs), but ICU does not warrant an 
exception. There are probably hundreds of applications using ICU in 
distros, if not more. Who knows what might break!


Also, sadly ICU does not maintain a stable API or ABI. So every 
application and library using ICU would need to be rebuilt and updated 
at the same time. Then the update would break any custom software that 
users have using the system ICU. Such an update would go badly... 
probably would wind up in tech news once people notice the breakage.


WebKitGTK can be updated because we maintain stable API/ABI.


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Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 7:08 pm, "Olmstead, Don"  
wrote:

Hi Michael,

There are a couple problems with checking in a version of ICU.

* Other libraries used by WebKit have dependencies on ICU. For our 
ports harfbuzz, libxml2, libxslt, libpsl and CFlite all require ICU.


You're right, it's a bad idea.

* ICU doesn't come with a CMake build system and its non-trivial to 
make one. We've largely used this 
https://github.com/LibCMaker/ICU_CMake_Files to handle building ICU 
but its use is also why ICU is the library we aren't able to update 
on a regular cadence.


Another good point. Hadn't thought that through far enough.

* We aren't terribly good with updating things in ThirdParty. 
Sometimes this is because there aren't releases, see gtest. Others 
because they don't actually have releases, see ANGLE. On top of that 
there might be local modifications to make things work within WebKit.


Of course, bundling things in ThirdParty is an absolute last resort. 
But when using system packages is no longer possible, what else to do? 
I have to support WebKit on RHEL 7, which has ICU 50. Mike from SUSE is 
trying to support SLE 12, which has ICU 52. You can see it doesn't add 
up. :)


But I didn't object to the ICU 60 proposal because (a) our dependency 
policy allows cutting off distros older than Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian 
Buster, and (b) I figured we would just bundle it. Instead, a better 
approach is probably to come up with downstream patches to revert all 
the changes that require ICU 60 and maintain them as long as we can. 
Same goes for CMake, but it's going to get a lot harder as WebKit usees 
more and more new CMake features. At some point we'll probably need to 
try bundling a custom CMake, since eventually that will be easier than 
patching WebKit to use ancient CMake.


Could you possibly give some overview of how WebKit is packaged by 
Linux distributions? I would have thought they would use 
flatpack/jhbuild to get the dependencies that the WPE/GTK ports are 
using especially if those dependencies have their own set of bug and 
security fixes. My experience with Linux is minimal so some context 
here would be appreciated.


No, distros build against their own system packages.

JHBuild is a developer tool. And flatpak is cool, but not used to build 
distro packages. Fedora is experimenting with distributing applications 
using flatpak, but you can't distribute system libraries that way.


For our ports we use vcpkg to build and manage dependencies. We host 
it at https://github.com/WebKitForWindows/WebKitRequirements and have 
an internal fork for PlayStation. I'm guessing it's probably similar 
to flatpack/jhbuild in terms of functionality but in our case we just 
use GitHub releases to have binaries ready.


Perhaps there are better ways for us to approach the requirements 
that would be beneficial to all ports?


I don't think there's really anything to do other than to decide how 
many old distros we're willing to cut off of updates. Currently the 
dependencies policy protects distros for three years. To continue 
supporting Ubuntu 16.04 (which reaches EOL in April 2021), it would 
need to be extended to five years. Probably not many developers would 
be very happy with that at all. But Ubuntu have a five-year lifecycle, 
so it's tough beans for WebKit users if we drop support before that 
time. RHEL and SLE have 10 and 12-year lifecycles, respectively... 
nobody is going to propose supporting that upstream, we just have to 
either figure out how to deal with it or cut off updates eventually 
once it becomes too hard to build.


I'd support extending our dependencies policy from three years up to 
five years... only problem is, five years makes it really hard to use 
new C++ features, and we like those. :( Anyway, with the current 
dependencies policy, ICU 60 is allowed. We'll just have to figure out 
how to deal with it downstream.


Michael


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Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 11:49 am, Alexey Proskuryakov  
wrote:


The license is not BSD or LGPL, so that's one aspect to consider.

Why exactly are distros unwilling to update ICU?

- Alexey


Distros would upgrade to newer minor releases of the library, but 
updating system packages to new major versions is not allowed in most 
stable distros.


Sometimes distros make exceptions (e.g. for WebKitGTK, which is special 
due to very high number of CVEs), but ICU does not warrant an 
exception. There are probably hundreds of applications using ICU in 
distros, if not more. Who knows what might break!



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Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Olmstead, Don]

Hi Michael,

There are a couple problems with checking in a version of ICU.

* Other libraries used by WebKit have dependencies on ICU. For our ports 
harfbuzz, libxml2, libxslt, libpsl and CFlite all require ICU.
* ICU doesn't come with a CMake build system and its non-trivial to make one. 
We've largely used this https://github.com/LibCMaker/ICU_CMake_Files to handle 
building ICU but its use is also why ICU is the library we aren't able to 
update on a regular cadence.
* We aren't terribly good with updating things in ThirdParty. Sometimes this is 
because there aren't releases, see gtest. Others because they don't actually 
have releases, see ANGLE. On top of that there might be local modifications to 
make things work within WebKit.

Could you possibly give some overview of how WebKit is packaged by Linux 
distributions? I would have thought they would use flatpack/jhbuild to get the 
dependencies that the WPE/GTK ports are using especially if those dependencies 
have their own set of bug and security fixes. My experience with Linux is 
minimal so some context here would be appreciated.

For our ports we use vcpkg to build and manage dependencies. We host it at 
https://github.com/WebKitForWindows/WebKitRequirements and have an internal 
fork for PlayStation. I'm guessing it's probably similar to flatpack/jhbuild in 
terms of functionality but in our case we just use GitHub releases to have 
binaries ready.

Perhaps there are better ways for us to approach the requirements that would be 
beneficial to all ports?

-Original Message-
From: webkit-dev  On Behalf Of Michael 
Catanzaro
Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2020 10:32 AM
To: Kirsling, Ross 
Cc: webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org
Subject: Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit


Any objections to uploading a bundled ICU 60 under Source/ThirdParty?

Seems easier than forcing downstreams to work out bundling themselves. 
Most major distros will just stop providing WebKit security updates if we don't 
bundle it for them. E.g. this is sure to kill Ubuntu's current long streak of 
providing our updates to Ubuntu 16.04.


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Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Darin Adler]

Here’s my take:

The source code we check into the WebKit repository is there for the 
convenience of the people *contributing* to WebKit, and is need not be the sole 
input when building and packaging WebKit for distribution.

Including ICU sources in a GTK WebKit tarball would not necessarily require 
checking ICU source code into the WebKit repository.

Everything else being equal, adding more files to the WebKit repository does 
make things less convenient for contributors. I would like us to do what we can 
to cut down the files, including things like unused PNG files in the 
LayoutTests directories, any source code that was needed at one time but is not 
needed in practice any more, including source code in the ThirdParty directory.

— Darin
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Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

The license is not BSD or LGPL, so that's one aspect to consider.

Why exactly are distros unwilling to update ICU?

- Alexey


> 9 апр. 2020 г., в 10:32 AM, Michael Catanzaro  
> написал(а):
> 
> 
> Any objections to uploading a bundled ICU 60 under Source/ThirdParty?
> 
> Seems easier than forcing downstreams to work out bundling themselves. Most 
> major distros will just stop providing WebKit security updates if we don't 
> bundle it for them. E.g. this is sure to kill Ubuntu's current long streak of 
> providing our updates to Ubuntu 16.04.
> 
> 
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Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Michael Catanzaro]

Any objections to uploading a bundled ICU 60 under Source/ThirdParty?

Seems easier than forcing downstreams to work out bundling themselves. 
Most major distros will just stop providing WebKit security updates if 
we don't bundle it for them. E.g. this is sure to kill Ubuntu's current 
long streak of providing our updates to Ubuntu 16.04.



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Re: [webkit-dev] Introducing a minimum ICU version for WebKit

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2020 at 4:25 PM Kirsling, Ross 
wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
>
>
> Just sending out an email blast for visibility regarding
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209694.
>
>
>
> This patch:
>
>- Upgrades the Mac ICU headers under Source/WTF/icu from ICU 55 to ICU
>62, matching Mojave
>- Introduces a minimum ICU version of 60.2 throughout the codebase, as
>required by GTK for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
>
>
>
> As written in the ChangeLog, the immediate motivations are:
>
>1. To properly establish a minimum ICU version for WebKit as a whole
>(responding to a pain point identified in
>https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209579)
>2. To support the development of ECMA-402 Intl API features, which JSC
>is quite behind on
>(and which often boil down to exposing ICU functionality to JavaScript)
>
>
>
> The only remaining concern of which I am aware is that AppleWin’s ICU
> headers, stored in WebKitAuxiliaryLibrary.zip, need to be upgraded from ICU
> 49 to 62 (to match the lib files stored in WebKitSupportLibrary.zip). We do
> have a potential workaround for this (i.e. having CMake copy the Mac
> headers to WebKitLibraries/win) but it is feared that this may break
> Apple-internal builds and we would certainly like to avoid a revert if
> possible. Any help on this front would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
FWIW, I've been told that Brent / Per might be able to help you there but
might need some more time due to other more urgent commitments.

- R. Niwa
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