Stabilization Spree ’07

Feb 6, 2007

by Maciej Stachowiak

After 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.