some notes about Safari team plans for WebCore and JavaScriptCore

[Darin Adler]

Hi folks,

A while ago, someone asked us here if we are ready to do some things to 
get less divergent from KHTML now that we have Safari 1.0 done. In 
fact, the slightly more relaxed time after Safari 1.0 has not yet come, 
because we are busily working to get Safari working well with the new 
Mac OS X system software release, Panther, which had its big developer 
release on the same day that Safari 1.0 was released.

That having been said, here are some things we plan to do:

- We would like send someone to the KDE conference in the Czech 
Republic, most likely Maciej. We'll work out the details soon, but it 
would be useful to know if there's one particular day or days that 
would be best for any Safari team visitors. I think the whole week is a 
bit too long for one of our engineers to be away at that time.

- We plan to deliver change lists from WebCore-60 to WebCore-73 to 
WebCore-85 (same for JavaScriptCore). We have an idea about how to make 
these from our internal change logs that should make them even more 
useful than the earlier change lists, even though they're terribly late.

- We plan to have the next major source code release of WebCore include 
our "layout tests"; the expected results probably won't be useful on 
platforms other than Macintosh, but the tests probably will be.

- We plan to carefully review and roll in all changes from the last 
"complete merge" we did to the tip of the 3.1 branch of KHTML after our 
work on the Panther release is done. On the other hand, we don't plan 
to roll in changes wholesale from the tip of tree until there's a KDE 
release considered "stable" with that code in it, although we'll 
continue to cherry pick fixes and code as before.

- We would like to come up with a way to do "nightly builds" so that 
people helping us test WebCore and JavaScriptCore can do that often 
between Safari releases. No real issue for the KDE world, but I thought 
I'd mention it.

- We would like to put WebCore and JavaScriptCore in a CVS repository 
where contributors can check in and out of it. There are still a number 
of minor issues that need to be resolved first on our end. Even if we 
don't see a significant number of programmers who want to donate their 
time and effort making changes, this could be still helpful in the 
"merging in both directions" process with the KDE original of KHTML.

- Although we don't want to rule it out permanently, we don't plan to 
share a single source tree with the KDE original of KHTML any time in 
the foreseeable future.

Perhaps this insight into our future plans will be useful.

     -- Darin