UDS, Seed 0.8
May 27, 2009
UDS
I’m at UDS this week, and it’s great as always, I’m really excited for Karmic as a release on the desktop front. I’m also looking forward to a session on packaging GObject-introspection stuff later today.
Barcelona seems to be a great city, though I’ve had a little trouble finding places for dinner, etc…I think this is mostly my fault. I’m completely exhausted, as always at UDS.
Seed 0.8 and WebKit upstream
I’m releasing Seed 0.8 later today, with all sorts of cool stuff (cairo bindings!). When looking back through commits to compile a ChangeLog, I was reminded of something that happened since the last release, that I thought might be worth bringing up. In the WebKit v. Mozilla debate, a lot of people have brought up the idea that somehow Mozilla will be a more responsive upstream to GNOME than WebKit (as WebKit is heavily funded by Apple). So, while writing the cairo bindings, I ran in to a bug in the JSCore API, and I mention in a commit message that this is “working around a WebKit bug”, and make a note to file a bug later. However, almost immediately, bdash pings me in #webkit, asking about the bug (someone is watching Seed commit messages I guess), I make a reduced test case, and it’s fixed upstream about 10 minutes later. WebKit upstream has been really friendly, both to me, and the WebKit/GTK+ developers (as mentioned by xan), and though Apple does have less of an interest in free software than Mozilla (though, it could be argued that Mozilla has almost no interest in Linux), there’s a lot of interest in supporting WebKit outside of their platform, and this is good for us.
May 27, 2009 at 12:22 pm
“Mozilla has almost no interest in Linux” is too harsh: you get blog posts about native Gtk+ widgets and Tango icons. “Mozilla cares less about Linux than other platforms” would be more accurate.
May 27, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Great work on seed!
IMHO there are three things left to do now:
a) split out JSCore into a separate lib for use by seed (feels stupid to require a full webkit!)
b) port gnome-shell to seed!
c) port popular epiphany extensions to seed and make it the default extension system for 2.28.
After that I would imagine seed being a 1st class GNOME technology and many more project making use of it. That would certainly rock!
May 27, 2009 at 4:54 pm
In my experience (of trying to upstream Gecko bug fixes) it’s not that Mozilla is uninterested in Linux (they’ve eagerly taken Gtk specific fixes) but they’re interested in Firefox much much more than anything else (they don’t like taking patches for things that don’t affect the Firefox app).
Apple, or at least the team working on WebKit (which includes a bunch of great ex-GNOME hackers) seem to consider WebKit a separate product in a way that Mozilla don’t seem to treat Gecko as.
Mozilla’s moving towards having comprehensive unit tests like WebKit has which should help them accept patches to the platform that don’t affect Firefox, but I think there’s still a cultural problem. Even the “platform team” at Mozilla effectively works on Firefox as the product, while WebKit is used extensively on different products within Apple so there seems to be less of a one-to-one relationship between browser platform and product.
At least that’s been my experience…