On 16-Feb-07, at 9:22 PM, Mike Emmel wrote:
Actually their are five ports. QT OSX Gdk Windows and S60 you forgot
the windows port. Of the five the windows port and gdk port are not
progressing that well and don't have a lot of developer support. The
QT S60 and OSX ports have a lot of developers with commit access and
these port are proceeding so its 3 live ports and 2 half dead ones.
Here is the link of what you have to go through to commit now.
http://webkit.org/coding/contributing.html
People wanting to do a new port are not going to go through this long
trial program just to commit in fact that have not. The KDE team has
pre-existing interest and both OSX and S60 are commercial. The two
true open source ports gdk/windows plus the wx widget port have
basically been failures so far.
If you mean to say that the impression given off by the webkit
project is one of "we don't want you" or at least "we're not really
interested in having more people join our project", I have to agree.
I still don't get the feeling of a welcoming project. Is it a form
of extreme paranoia that some new developer might introduce a bug?
Maybe.... I'm not sure I consider that a valid reason though.
So from and opens source perspective webkit is not a smashing success
in drawing in the open source community only the KDE team has really
contributed and they were the original developers. The S60 port also
has a history of working with KHTML before webkit was made
a open project.
I wouldn't say so. I think the KDE contribution is effectively
nil. The Qt port is distinct from KDE plans. KDE as a community has
yet to find a way to work together with WebKit for reasons that I
think you're also experiencing and perhaps not clearly articulating.
Yes I'm writing this from @kde.org and have contributed a huge amount
to KDE, KHTML, etc over the past 8-9 years. Until I have the KDE
community feeling welcome and confident in participating, and until
we have functioning code and development happening for a useful
kpart, I don't see our Qt port as anything relevant to KDE. I'm
trying to make it relevant, and I want it to be relevant, but it
really isn't.
I've had a webkit SVN account for almost 2 years now. I first
tried to merge WebKit code back to KDE after all the KDE developers
effectively gave up, and after successfully merging JavaScriptCore
(with Maksim's help), determined that it just wasn't feasible to go
any further without a complete replacement. I then started the
current Qt port and managed to enlist several KDE developers to help
me. At least one has given up again already, unsurprisingly. We
made some great progress but it's an absolutely ridiculous
development model as far as getting real work done. So far we had:
1) Work outside webkit SVN to start the port
-> webkit renames and refactors hit us hard
2) Port again, also outside of WebKit SVN (note: we were doing a very
large number of commits/week. far more than now)
3) Spend far too much time merging from WebKit SVN, especially when
things like renames and refactors happen
4) Eventually give up and merge back to webkit SVN
5) End up in a ridiculous situation of having one member of the
porting team as the only person with rights to review the work.
Interesting, since that person has no-one who can review his work
under the formal rules. The guy who started the port, and the guy
who invented KHTML altogether are not given review rights.
6) Work slows down drastically as developers are discouraged and are
stuck in procedure that has relatively little value for the given
situation.
Not a good model. Maybe it works in an office with a couple of
infrequent contributors, but it doesn't work so well for a
distributed network of people trying to contribute significant
amounts of code. I fully agree that some sections of webkit need
strict review control, testcases, bug reports, and other formal
procedures. I strongly support it in fact. The current situation is
not limited to just this. Moreover, it feels very much like a
Brusselized project, in stark contrast to where it came from
originally. This feeling applies to "ports" as much as anything else
right now.
In my book this makes WebKit a failed open source project so far.
I wouldn't go that far. I would call it a successful open source
project with a rather closed community at the moment. Open source
doesn't need community, but it sure helps. I really don't think
there are any technical problems, just social ones.
--
George Staikos
KDE Developer http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc. http://www.staikos.net/
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