Re: WebKitGTK+ as an external dependency

[Alp Toker <alp nuanti com>]

2009/5/4 Xan Lopez <xan gnome org>:
> On the accessibility camp, I am sponsored by Igalia to spend as much
> time as needed in the 2.28 scope (or beyond) to make WebKitGTK+ meet
> all the specified requirements. I've finished and merged most of Alp's
> pending patches mentioned in the November 2.26 thread, and thanks to
> the help and support of Joanmarie and Willie Walker we have identified
> many new issues that we have either already fixed or that we'll
> continue working on. You can see the meta-bug recently opened by
> Joanmarie to track all the forthcoming a11y progress here:
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25531. As Niels Bohr used to
> say prediction is very difficult, especially about the future, but I'm
> confident that the a11y situation by 2.28 will be satisfactory for
> everyone.

Brilliant work Xan! Thanks for the continued activity on the a11y patches.

>  - We have been releasing snapshots of the development branch twice
> per month since March, starting with 1.1.1 and up to 1.1.6 last week.
> They are all available in the project page. We also have a NEWS file
> (http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk/WebKit/gtk/NEWS) where
> you can see a summary of the changes for each release, plus regular
> blog posts by Gustavo and myself.
>  - We'll keep releasing bi-weekly snapshots until 2.28, when we'll
> release a (probably numbered 1.2.0) stable version. In the future, we
> aim to keep making one stable release every 6 months, in sync with
> GNOME.
> - We have quite a few regular contributors now, plus two more WebKit
> reviewers in the team (Gustavo and myself again), so I think the
> community has grown both in size and health in the past months.

Congratulations on the +r bits. The community is really there now.

>
> I'd like to end the email by requesting feedback from all the module
> maintainers that are considering a switch to WebKitGTK+, in light of
> the idea proposed by the Release Team of making a general switch from
> gecko to webkit in all modules at the same time: have you tried the
> latest releases? Are your needs covered by now? Please reply to the
> list with any issues you might have or features you might need (or
> even to say that all is fine), so that we can address any problem
> earlier rather than later in the cycle.

With my user / developer hat on, I'd like to give a thumbs up here.
Can you give a brief view of the state of the API (soup is an API
dependency now, what else?), particularly with regard to stability.
What are the areas we can expect to see development in?

Binding authors will need to adapt to some of those changes and it
might be a good idea to coordinate the language binding set with this
ongoing work. External dependency will probably help here too.

In terms of accessibility, Orca has quite a bit of hard-coded Firefox
/ Gecko specific logic. My review of that was that it wouldn't work
well as is, but that WebKit has the opportunity to handle more of that
logic internally to thin down the code needed in tools like Orca. Does
that match up with what you've been seeing? Is anyone willing to put
in the time on the Orca side?

And finally, are there any unported projects remaining? I helped port
a few applications and the patches have been integrated, and you've
kept things active on the Epiphany side. GIMP, DevHelp, Yelp,
Epiphany, Epiphany Extensions, Blam, Conduit and externally various
Mono applications, Lifearea.
http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/ApplicationsGtk has a more complete list.
But with so many projects, are there any we've missed? Any patches
still waiting to be merged from a branch? Maintainers, please speak
up!

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