On Tue, Mar 8 2022 at 03:01:04 PM +0100, Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez
<clo...@igalia.com> wrote:
It turns out this above opinion of mine doesn't reflect a consensus
opinion inside Igalia.
After sending the above e-mail, I talked with my colleagues at Igalia
(my failure for not doing that before) and it seems that we are not
happy with committing to support the libraries for such long amount
of time.
Ah, alas. Well it's ultimately Igalia's choice, of course.
- Which port(s) is RedHat interested in supporting? Only the GTK
port, or both GTK and WPE?
We ship WebKitGTK, libwpe, and wpebackend-fdo, but not WPE WebKit.
- Is RedHat willing to devote development time to work upstream on
the goal of keeping WebKit working with older libraries?
Um, yes, of course nobody except me is likely to spend time to keep
WebKit building on RHEL. The difference is I would be able to commit my
changes upstream in the future, instead of keeping them downstream and
rebasing them when they break. E.g. it looks like
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235367 will have to live
downstream. If we had this policy, I would be able to land stuff like
that upstream too.
The main impact on other developers would be an increased wait before
you can remove preprocessor guards that support older library versions.
That could be annoying, but I don't think it will require too much time
commitment.
- Will buildbots be provided for RHEL, in the same way Igalia
maintains Ubuntu LTS and Debian stable builders to catch issues?
I'm not personally very concerned about whether we have upstream
builders for RHEL, since fixing problems when they reach tarball
releases is good enough for me. But yes, since you requested it, we can
probably add upstream bots. (They would probably actually run CentOS
Stream, not RHEL.) That will take some time, though, because I'm not
currently working on it. In my previous mail, I said I would defer this
proposal until we are ready with the requested bots.
I do very much want to add more JSC cloop EWS, and I bet Red Hat
infrastructure folks might find time to help with those. We can
probably add some builders at the same time. But to keep timeline in
perspective: I've been planning this for years, but have not yet
started on it. :P
In any case, we think that 3+2 of support is too much. We can maybe
agree on 3+1 (support each RHEL version until one year after the next
one, like we do with Debian/Ubuntu) or on just 3 (no extra year of
support), depending on how much RH is willing to help upstream.
Hm, I guess I'd better gratefully accept whatever I can get. I'll
attempt to keep it working downstream for the full 3+2 years regardless.
Regarding resources from Red Hat to help upstream: that's going to
remain just me. Certainly I would handle any changes needed to keep
WebKit working on RHEL. Beyond that, I'll continue to help out a bit
here and there. I wouldn't expect to see major changes in my
contribution habits.
Michael
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