Stabilization Spree ‘07
Posted by Maciej Stachowiak on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 10:24 pmAfter many discussions with interested parties and members of the WebKit community, we’ve decided the time has come to get serious about stabilizing the code. We’ve had about two years of development, which has included many awesome compatibility fixes, performance improvements, standards compliance enhancements, and new features. Now is the time to get the source tree in solid shape. As part of this, we are announcing two changes.
Trunk Checkins Restricted
Starting Wednesday, February 7th, we are going to limit trunk checkins to the following categories:
- Critical bug fixes: crashes, hangs, regressions, compatibility issues with major sites. Basically all P1s.
- Porting changes that only affect that specific port, or have only a small impact on the core cross-platform code.
- Significant (P2 level) bug fixes where the change seems simple and low risk.
For any other kinds of changes, including the following, we will ask that you hold off, or to use a branch:
- New features (including new CSS properties, unimplemented tags and attributes, new DOM APIs, new areas of functionality in general).
- Bug fixes that seem low value (not known to significantly affect real-world sites) but high risk (code change to fix it is large).
Bug Days
On Wednesday and Thursday of this week we’d like to encourage everyone in the WebKit community to show up on the #webkit channel on irc.freenode.net to help with the stabilization effort. Even if you don’t have a lot of experience with fixing P1 bugs, doing bug reductions, or testing and filing new bugs, there will be experienced WebKit developers around to help. We will keep track of who submits the most P1 bug fixes, the most bug reductions, and the most new critical bugs, and there may be some sort of public recognition at the end.
We especially encourage developers working for companies that have expressed an interest in porting WebKit and having a more stable trunk to show up and help out. Now is your chance to start contributing back in a way that benefits everyone.
February 7th, 2007 at 6:15 am
[...] Feb7 Maciej announces feature freeze for WebKit nightlies. They’re going to focus on stability leading up to the L [...]
February 8th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
[...] Safari web browser rapidly approaching release. Meanwhile, the Webkit development team is focusing on stabilization. Technorati Tags: Safari, Webkit, Apple, Leopard Filed under: technology & w [...]
February 8th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Is the captcha graphic fixed? (If so, sorry for the noise.)
February 12th, 2007 at 4:24 am
Stupid question: do memory leaks qualify as critical bugs?
I have my computer slow down significantly a few times a week and 95% of the time the culprit turns out to be Safari that’s leaked so much RAM the computer has started swapping. I once tried to make a “leaks Safari” report when this happened and learned the leaks utility seems to end up consuming more RAM than the total size of the leaks during the process of creating the report. At 700MB+ of leaks, the Powerbook slowed down to the point where it took minutes to kill the leaks process.
As a result I’m really hoping the next Safari version is significantly better in regards to the memory leaks than the existing one. The nightlies are definitely better in this sense but I’m hoping leak hunting won’t stop.
February 12th, 2007 at 5:56 am
Significant reproducible memory leaks are indeed critical bugs and you will find a number of them on the current P1 list. If you can come up with steps to reproduce any with the nightlies, then please file more bug reports.
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:14 am
Rashad…
It’s hard to believe that there are people in today’s workforce who…