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So what is happening with Safari Patches????
by foobie on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @18:42
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As one of those bystanders of us who don't read the dev lists, I'm confused.
Apple seems to be using Safari quite well, and I'm assumming that will be their "Enterprise" browser. Yet this interview seems to suggest dropping KHTML in favor of Gecko.
So what is apple doing differently? Are they actually doing more developement that is not trivial to roll back into KHTML? (For that matter apple stated that they used KHTML instead of Gecko because it was easier to code for and a cleaner, lighter code base).
I run kde on the desktop but use Firefox mainly because gmail works with it (wow, gmail also works with safari).
This just seems silly to me.... |
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by Datschge on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @19:59
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Short answer: There are no Safari patches.
Long answer: There is no shared resource for KHTML/KJS's source code, instead Apple decided to develop KHTML/KJS further in house and releases them as WebCore/JavaScriptCore. There never were and still aren't enough developers working on KHTML/KJS to really keep up with all the changes done by Apple which aren't available as patches nor are documented. And today the sources for both versions are different enought to make "back merges" non-trivial. Now most improvements on KHTML are done more or less completely by KHTML developers on their own, just taking a look at WebCore or Gecko to see how particular issues are solved there. As one developer noted on a mailinglist regarding this topic, solving problems on your own is way more interesting than trying to merge two increasingly different source bases. However I'm sure people looking at merging more Apple improvement into KHTML/KJS are always welcome.
You see there are many areas where KDE could make good use of more developers.
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by foobie on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @22:00
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Interesting way for a company to take advantage of open source.
Take a (l)gpl'ed product and fork it so fast that the original developers can't keep up with it.
It seems like a shame and contrary to the spirit of open source. (Let's hope MS doesn't learn too much from apple ;) )
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @23:33
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> Interesting way for a company to take advantage of open source.
> Take a (l)gpl'ed product and fork it so fast that the original developers can't keep up with it.
I don't think that's a fair evaluation. Ask some rational questions. What is Apple supposed to do after they have made their changes? Wait for KDE developers to catch up before the make any more? There are several things we want from webcore to use with Quanta, but it just looks like a long time before a lot of them can be brought in and it's no simple merge.
Open source is a marvelous thing, but unfortunately for a lot of people it's a mythical concept that works this way... Because the source is open zillions of developers constantly review and update it. Of course a "zillion" is a fictitious number and therein lies the truth. A remarkably small number of developers, as in a tiny fraction of a percent of all users, do an amazing job of producing software. Even the percent who "contribute" by griping is remarkably small. ;-)
Consider the numbers... KDE has millions of users, hundreds of developers and how many core applications? Do the math. Better yet learn to code. ;-)
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by Carewolf on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @02:46
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The nice thing would be to send the changes back as a series of patches, or atleast keep openly track of changes in their release, so we had a kind of changelog. Currently we have no idea of whether or not a bug is fixed in WebCore, or when we spot a change what is supposed to be good for.
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by superstoned on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @03:39
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I dont understand why they dont help... they where quite cooperative, the first time they did sent patches or at least a comprehensive list of changes, did they?
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by anon on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @06:57
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They still release a comprehensive set of changes in each version of Webcore, but most things rely on other things to be merged. And merging is very hard to do right without breaking stuff. A shared code base would probably been the best thing to do in hindsight. @ a khtml.org or something.
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by brockers on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @08:35
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So does this mean that the Safari/khtml thing is screwed? Do we bascially have two seperate code bases that don't crossover at all? What need to happen to get these two groups working together again? Gecko is ok, but from a design standpoint khtml is far far superior and I just hate to see what could be one of our best deverlopment resources waisted.
Bobby
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by Datschge on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @16:44
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Pretty much all developers working on KHTML also/mainly work on other areas within KDE, while KHTML definitely needs someone to focus on it full time (and doing so within KDE, not for Apple). When looking on CIA (see some posts further down this page) the only one who seems to work on KHTML exclusively is Germain Garand, someone should hire him to let him do so full time. =)
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by Mike Hearn on Friday 08/Oct/2004, @08:12
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I think it is a very fair evaluation, to be honest. It's well known how to have corporate hackers work well with volunteer hackers, it's done in open source projects like the kernel, Wine, and yes KDE/GNOME all the time. You send back patches in series, with a detailed changelog. You should develop those patches in the open, with discussion on the mailing lists.
In other words, you do not do what Apple has done - effectively fork the codebase in secret and then give the original developers a huge unworkable patch dump. I've had to deal with such things from TransGaming in Wine and they're basically useless, especially as often they duplicate code already written by volunteers and usually nobody understands the changes except developers who aren't in the community. The way CodeWeavers does it is *much* preferable (disclaimer: I am biased, I work for CodeWeavers. But I wouldn't work for them if they didn't interact with the community well).
To be frank it doesn't surprise me that KHTML has forked, Apple clearly have no interest in working with the community on it and demonstrated this from the start. They fulfill their legal obligations and do no more.
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by foobie on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @22:49
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Thanks again for your answer-
A couple more questions:
Where are the mailing lists? (If you have the link to the developer you mentioned that would be great)
Also is it possible to do the same thing they did to us back to them? (Basically take their fork and wrap it back in as a KHTML replacement. Call it KHTML2.0 or something.)
It just seems like there should be some sort of expose on this. Someone needs to put a writeup in a blog somewhere and get /. or osnews to link to it.
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by Anonymous on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @01:11
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> Where are the mailing lists?
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/khtml-devel
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kfm-devel
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by NeonDiet on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @17:31
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Of cause it's possible to take as much of Apple's WebCore/JavaScriptCore source code as you like and do what you want with it. Create a KHTML 2.0 with it if you want.
However, the problem is not down to access to the code, or any kind of legal obstacle, it's purely man hours (or the current shortage of) on the KHTML devel side. That's not Apple's fault.
You seem to think that Apple should write for two different sets of source trees, just because they took the Open Source code from KDE in the first place. Why should they do that? They didn't ask the KDE team to re-write KHTML for them in the first place so they could easily integrate it into OSX. They did all the leg work themselves. Now they've merged that code into their own framework, and that's the framework they're writing to. The source code for WebCore/JavaScriptCore is Open Source, so others can take that and make use of it for themselves if they want to. That can be the KDE team, or someone completely different. That's what Open Source means!! What it doesn't mean, is that you have to write someone else's applications for them, as you seem to want.
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches????
by Anonymous on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @20:14
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>I run kde on the desktop but use Firefox mainly because gmail works with it
From what I've read on the lists, gmail should now work on konqi too (http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=109690082612439&w=2). Are there any more problems? Is it worth building kde cvs?
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches????
by Ian Monroe on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @21:45
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Good to see its being worked, it would've been bad had GMail gone out of beta with no Konqueror capability in sight.
I pretty much just use Firefox now, which is annoying since some things (like saving a file without having to open a file save dialog) is easier in Konqueror.
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches????
by anon on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @07:09
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this thread might be interesting to read: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/khtml-devel/2004-July/001068.html
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches????
by Correction on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @08:01
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No, that's not true. People just got this whole thread wrong. Enterprise is not Gmail. Enterprise is for example, among others, SAP. SAP doesn't support Safari/KHTML. SAP supports Mozilla. The story ends.
And gmail also works with KHTML now.
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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches????
by Derek Kite on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @18:06
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gmail fixes went in this week.
Derek
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