From: ext Eric Seidel <e...@webkit.org<mailto:e...@webkit.org>>

I wish we didn’t have to worry about platforms we couldn’t test.

It can’t be the job of the core maintainers to care about all the peripheral 
ports which contribute very little core code. Our code needs to be structured 
in such a manner that its easy for the core to march forward, while letting the 
ports catch up as they need to asynchronously.  Platform support code shouldn’t 
even need to be in webkit.org<http://webkit.org>!  Porting 
webkit.org<http://webkit.org>’s platform abstractions should be trivial, but 
core developers (which probably 90% of them use only 2 ports Mac WK2 + Chromium 
Linux) shouldn’t need to worry about keeping all ports working.
As someone who works on the "peripheral" ports quite a bit I would have to 
agree that this is not a good situation. I would prefer a situation where my 
core contributions are considered valuable, and my "peripheral ports" 
contribution are not considered taxing.

> I wish we only had one build system
I think that having one meta-build system might help this quite a bit.
But what would really help me is if I could have a better understanding of 
which parts of the code are taxing for Apple and Google. For example, in 2011 
Oliver Hunt has communicated that the Qt JSC bindings were too taxing, and ever 
since we've done a lot of work to reduce that tax 
(https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60842). This was, to me, a productive 
communication about that problem.

> I wish I felt like reviewers understood/trusted each other more.
I think that if there was a clear and detailed communication about taxing 
properties of the "peripheral ports" or platform abstraction, perhaps in the 
form of bugs on bugzilla like the one I've mentioned, we can trust the 
contributors from the peripheral ports, together with everyone else, to find 
the right solutions.
How would it feel for people if we had something like a bugzilla 
component/topic to track those issues?

I think that solving those issues rather than pushing the peripheral ports to 
the side is in the benefit of the WebKit project, and is one of the things that 
differentiates it from projects like Mozilla that only support one company's 
browser(s). I'm hoping that other people see this value as well…

~Noam
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