Hi, the WebKit team at Igalia would like to propose upstreaming the WPE port of WebKit, taking on the duty to maintain it alongside the GTK+ port.
The WPE port started in 2014 as the 'WebKit for Wayland' project inside Igalia [1]. The port was derived from the GTK+ port, but avoided dependency on any GUI toolkit. It relied on the Wayland display protocol for on-screen presentation. That dependency was later dropped in favor of using generic interfaces to adapt to different platform-specific presentation systems. This allows any vendor to simply provide the necessary backend implementations that are tailored to their platform. The port is intended to be the Web platform engine of choice for embedded Linux systems. Since late 2014 Igalia has been sponsored by Metrological to further develop the WPE port, targeting primarily various set-top box platforms. Miguel Gomez blogged about this effort back in December [2]. The port can also address other embedded use cases, for instance in-vehicle infotainment or digital signage. The GTK+ and WPE ports mostly have the same dependencies except for the GTK+ toolkit library. That enables the two ports to already share a lot of code. The biggest difference between the two is that the WPE port exposes the WebKit2 C API, while the GTK+ port exposes a GObject-based API. Apart from that, the maintainers' plan is to further align the two ports as much as possible, ideally simply stacking the GTK+ port on top of WPE, with only a few additional tweaks for GTK+ integration. This would lessen the maintenance burden for both ports and the project as a whole. The WebKit team at Igalia thinks this port is on stable footing and has solid prospects for the future. That's why we'd like to join the upstream community and continue our work there. The patch with the port changes is in bug #171110 [3]. We have existing x86_64 buildbot configurations [4] that we would have to port over to the webkit.org build master. We're planning further builder and tester configurations for ARM architectures in the future. Layout test baselines would be landed separately. (Those too would be subject to alignment with the GTK+ port.) We're happy to address any questions or considerations. Regards, Zan [1] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2014-December/027087.html [2] https://blogs.igalia.com/magomez/2016/12/19/wpe-web-platform-for-embedded/ [3] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171110 [4] https://build-webkit.igalia.com/waterfall?category=WPE _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev