Re: Backends - was: ANNOUNCEMENT: The Future of Epiphany

[Robert Marcano <robert marcanoonline com>]

On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 23:39 +0100, Alp Toker wrote:

> This is one point most developers are agreeing on. There's little value 
> in pluggable web engine backends. The abstraction layers tend to limit 
> functionality and increase maintenance overhead with little benefit to 
> the user.

Yes, that is when you are using the engine you like the most, but not
everyone has the same needs.

I think everyone that used a crypto library saw little value on
abstracting that too, but a few years later something like this happens:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraCryptoConsolidation

Fedora is consolidating to only one crypto library (NSS) and read there
is work on patching every application, can we think in the future too
(if thinking on the people that need Gecko now is not enough)

> 
> There are WebKit patches for Yelp, Devhelp (removes 2000+ lines of Gecko 
> embedding code, replaced by ~100 lines of WebKit code and drops the 
> requirement for a C++ compiler), some experimental WebKit work in 
> Evolution and most (all?) other GNOME applications which use web content.

2000+ lines of code that everyone writes on every app, instead of using
a common API, those 100 lines of code what are doing is hiding the GTK
integration code inside the WebKit GTK port. something similar can be
done maintaining the abstraction layer

> 
> As I understand it some of these projects are now just waiting for the 
> external dependency to be finalised before switching to WebKit by default.
> 
> Speaking as an upstream WebKit maintainer we're happy to adapt the 
> project to meet the needs of GNOME developers, both in terms of features 
> and in project organisation, release cycle for the GTK+ port etc. We 
> want to see software like Epiphany and GNOME become the driving force 
> behind browser development rather than the other way round.
> 
> I hope this helps clear up some of your concerns.
> 
> Cheers!
________________________________________
Robert Marcano

web: http://www.marcanoonline.com/
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