Re: WebKitGTK+ as an external dependency

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hey All:

Just a heads up that we're working on getting someone in place on the 
Orca side.  Things are very close to being a done deal for that and 
we'll end up with a great collaboration between WebKit and GNOME folks 
for a11y.

Will

On 05/04/09 11:22, Alp Toker wrote:
> 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!