I've recently been spending some time reviewing some of the WebKit port that are not part of the core WebKit archive. Electronic Arts, for example, has been very good about making source dumps of their build of WebKit available (wow -- WebKit on the PS3! :), Playo has released their sources, and Valve was kind enough to point me at the version of Chromium they use for their own work.
While this transparency is fantastic, I find it depressing that in most cases these porters chose to significantly rearrange the source archive. This makes it difficult to evaluate the changes made to support various custom features, as well as drastically increasing the effort required to integrate these ports into WebKit proper. Google used this same approach with their Chromium port, the side effects of which find us in year two (or three?) of the effort to merge those changes back into the core WebKit archive. This phenomenon makes me wonder if we have some sort of deficiency in the layout of the WebKit sources, or the way we specify and link with various external dependencies, that lead new porters to embark on these large reorganizations? I did not find it difficult to work with the existing WebKit layout -- in fact, I find it logical and easy to understand. And certainly several other ports (such as the Windows CE, wxWidgets, Haiku, BEOS, etc.) were able to easily integrate with the existing layout. However, the existence of these several source variations is a clear indication that not everyone finds the source base so easy to work with. Perhaps if we understood the reasoning behind that led to these external source reorganizations we could do a better job presenting suitable API's for porters so that they would not feel the need to take these drastic steps. Can any of you external users share the reasons behind your reorganization efforts? Thanks, -Brent _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
