Slashdot Mirror
Safari And KHTML May Never Meet
diegocgteleline.es writes "Announcing that Safari passes the Acid2 test has raised some voices in the KDE world. Apple, they say, isn't playing friendly. They don't provide a CVS history, just the modified files where nobody can understand how and when things have changed. It's quite likely that KHTML developers will have to write their own code to pass the acid2 test. Zack Rusin writes: 'All I'm asking for is that all the clueless people stop talking about the cooperation between Safari/Konqueror developers and how great it is. There's absolutely nothing great about it. In fact "it" doesn't exist.'"
Looking at Safari developer Dave Hyatt's blog it looks like he's provided some patches. I'm sure it will take some work to get those into KHTML, but that seems to be a pretty good start to me.
This might be a good time to remind everyone that the patch has not yet been released to the public. The patch might make the browser unstable - further testing will be required. Depending on how long it takes before the patch makes it into the public version, Safari might not be the first browser to support Acid 2.
From yesterday's summary:
The patched Safari is not yet avaliable for public consumption. It is unknown when the patches will appear in a public version of Safari.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Every change in khtml has to be run through a regression suite to make sure it doesn't break anything. Now if you fix something a new regression test is added for that.
If you get fixes with no log of what they fix you will end up with bunch of code which you have no idea how to test for regressions. This is just one of the reasons why diffing codebase doesn't cut it.
Another good reason is damned diff is ~6mb because Apple guys never send small patches but only dump WebCore tarballs.
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Now that diff can't tell you why they've changed, but for Pete's sake, you're a developer. You've got the code. You've got the standard. You've got the changes in the code. You've got the old code. You can see how behaviour changes in each. You've (hopefully) got an reasonable general understanding of the codebase.
You obviously didn't read the blog entry.
The problem here is that Apple drops a huge diff on them for every release. It's not individual diffs for each change, but one massive one. We're talking about a diff several megabytes in size consisting of hundreds of changes. With all kinds of changes mixed in with eachother and mixed in with all kinds of Safari-specific stuff.
Yes it is possible to sit and pick that apart. But it's a lot of work. It may very well take more work to seperate out a change than to re-implement it from scratch.
On top of that it's unnecessary work, because there's no reason Apple wouldn't be able to hand over all individual patches seperately, which would make things immensely simpler for the KHTML guys.
Apparently the KTHML guys have tried and tried to get Apple to do this. And they haven't helped.
I can't access kdedevelopers.org, so here's the blog entry:
/. about Safari supporting the all crack Acid2 test and people raving how great it is for KHTML. The truth is that KHTML will probably never get those patches. Whats most probably going to happen is that one of us will simply reimplement it from scratch (and at the moment the reality is that if its not going to be Allan or Germain its not going to happen).
/. or some other equally stupid site will be praising Apple.
You cant even imagine how I hate that question. The truth is most probably never. I just read the article on
Code in Safari is hugely inconsistent and changes are always interdependent. Theres basically no way of merging in one change without bringing a whole bunch of others in. And you know what? Dont even tell me about merging stuff like render_canvasimage.h,cpp. It outright uses OS X apis. Well never be able to merge that in - someone will have to implement it. And whats going to happen when someone does? Some jackass on
In the past when someone spent long hours implementing something in KHTML, they at least got a thank you from people using Konqueror. Now its well finally! It was working in Safari. khtml developers are lazy. Wheres the fun in that?
Do you have any idea how hard it is to be merging between two totally different trees when one of them doesnt have any history? Thats the situation KDE is in. We created the khtml-cvs list for Apple, they got CVS accounts for KDE CVS. What did we get? We get periodical code bombs in the form of them releasing WebCore. Many of us wanted to even sign NDAs with Apple to at least get access to the history of their internal vcs and be able to be merging the changes incrementally, the way they can right now. Nothing came out of it. They do the very, very minimum required by LGPL.
And you know what? Thats their right. They made a conscious decision about not working with KDE developers. All Im asking for is that all the clueless people stop talking about the cooperation between Safari/Konqueror developers and how great it is. Theres absolutely nothing great about it. In fact it doesnt exist. Maybe for Apple - at the very least for their marketing people. Clear?
Actually the biggest problem right now is that Apple are not keeping up with code-cleanup. We constantly try to develop more elegant easier to maintain code, where as Apple wants the right features - right now.
Safari is basically still KHTML from KDE 3.1 with a ton of bug fixes and features. Many of the features takes time to port because they do not live up to our coding standards.
Why is everybody missing this KHTML developer's point? It's right there in the short Slashdot summary. He acknowledges that Apple is fulfilling their legal obligations by providing the modified files. But they're not providing any help at all in making their changes useful to the KHTML team. So, there's no "collaboration" at all from Apple's side. That's all. He's not even flaming Apple. If anyone, he's flaming people who misunderstand this situation.