Archive for August, 2007

Thanks to whoever ftp-master who did the review and approval, WebKit is now in unstable. It has not yet been built on all architectures, but several FTBFSes have already shown up :

• on arm, because #if defined(arm) doesn't seem to do much with our toolchain, and because gcc doesn't pack a simple struct such as struct { short x ; } on arm, while it obviously does by default on all other architectures,
• on hppa, apparently because of a kernel bug,
• on s390, maybe fixable by using gcc 4.2.

I already fixed the arm issue in our git tree, but am waiting for the last buildds to keep up before uploading a new release, in case some other architecture would fail to build. I'd be very much thankful if some people with alpha, x86_64, ia64, mips, or powerpc machines could do some basic testing with /usr/lib/WebKit/GdkLauncher and /usr/lib/WebKit/QtLauncher and report any problem (BTS preferred).

Again, interested people are invited to subscribe to the pkg-webkit-maintainers mailing list.

What would you expect a software such as VMware ESX server, in its latest version, to do when it technically can't do what you would like it to do ?

Well, I, for one, would expect it, at least, to tell me... but it doesn't. If you don't have VT enabled on an Intel 64bits processor-based server, and want to run a 64bits OS in a VM configured to host a 64bits guest, it doesn't tell you. All you have for your eyes to stare at is an error message from the guest OS saying that the processor doesn't support 64bits instructions. You have to gather from this message that it only needs VT extensions to be enabled.

Now, if you're not very familiar with these technical details, what would be your first test on such a server ? I'd say, most probably, try to run the 64bits OS on the bare hardware... which would succeed, indeed, leaving the user in a big blur.

Note that in the "processor" part of the configuration panel in the Virtual Infrastructure Client, while there is information about Hyperthreading being enabled or not, there is nothing about of VT.

Along with a new epiphany release using it as backend, I prepared a new WebKit snapshot, which is now waiting in NEW for some ftp-master attention. Unfortunately, while webkit now has the necessary symbols for back and forward buttons, it seems not to work properly. Scrollbars are also not yet displayed. I'll have to take a look at these some day, if upstream doesn't do it before me.

I also set up a git repository to hold the debian branch, following the already existing git repository tracking upstream. Note the filtered branch, which avoids the debian branch to contain what we don't ship, and reduce the download size from 100MB+ to roughly 16MB. I'll write more about this filtering in a few days.

Also, if you're interested in webkit and/or want to give a hand, you can subscribe to the pkg-webkit-maintainers mailing list. Everything is ready for team maintenance, so, don't hesitate ;).

If you want to track changes on the debian repo, there is also a pkg-webkit-commits mailing list where the post-receive hook sends the commit messages.

I finally uploaded the first release of WebKit to unstable. It will obviously need to go through NEW first, which might take some time.

There still is work to do, first of which being to correctly setup the git repositories. For the moment, there is only a git repository following upstream svn available on git.d.o. The branches are a bit messy, though ; I have to figure out why git-svn insists on randomly recreating the master branch... I supposedly removed the master branch to have the svn branch follow the git-svn remote.

Anyways, once it is sorted out, I'll set up a special branch to create our tarballs and from which we'd derive the debian branch (or not, this is not decided yet). This special branch will be a copy of the upstream branch with some stuff removed (see debian/copyright in the current packages source for a list of these).

Speaking of the package source, since NEW is not available, I made the packages sources and binaries available on gluck.

An important note: the version I uploaded is made from revision 24735 of upstream svn repository, which is from July 27. Unfortunately, to be able to build the first version of epiphany that includes webkit embedding (2.19.6) as is, webkit_gtk_page_can_go_forward and webkit_gtk_page_can_go_backward are needed, and these, while available in the API headers, only appeared in the source code on July 30.

However, I built a hacked epiphany with calls to these functions removed (which means back and forward buttons won't work properly), and made it available on gluck too. Be aware this version requires glib and gtk from experimental, which, I've been said, made all gtk/glib warnings fatal. That means all applications that usually fill your .xsession-errors log file are likely to crash with these versions.

You'll note integration is not yet perfect, biggest misfeature being the scrollbars missing, and some glitches such as the user agent (it is hardcoded in WebKit :-/), and the about window still saying it is based on Gecko ;)

I'll try to push a new version of WebKit soon enough.

Stay tuned.

I often see people posting on planet.d.o, or on some list, talking about how they rebuilt the whole archive to test whether X or Y. Don't you think it would be useful to have a somewhat buildd network to do such experiments or QA testing ? Or at least some infrastructure that would make it easy to do ?

For instance, I would like to do some build testing of the whole archive, with hooked dh_strip and whatever else could be necessary, so that it can be determined how many packages follow recommendations on policy 10.1 about debugging symbols. Problem is I am far from having enough resources to do this...

Update : Actually, it would probably be enough to check the result of builds with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nostrip