Archive for April, 2008

I uploaded xulrunner 1.9~b5-1 yesterday, and today was webkit's turn, with an upload of svn revision 31841, which happens to be the last revision on trunk as of writing.

Thanks to Mark Rowe, the most problematic crashers I experienced with webkit while preparing this upload have been fixed in revisions 31821 and 31787. This had the side effect to delay the upload enough that we now have the benefit of improved SVG animations support, and CSS gradients.

For those who like numbers, you can take a look at the Sunspider results for xulrunner 1.9~b5 (running mybrowser ; very similar results to what I got with 1.9~b4), and Sunspider results for webkit r31842 (when you compare to previous results for webkit r27674, there are significant improvements).

For another kind of numbers:

~/git/xulrunner$ git diff upstream/1.9... | filterdiff -x b/debian/* -x a/configure | diffstat | tail -1
36 files changed, 507 insertions(+), 291 deletions(-)

Compared to:
~/git/xulrunner$ git diff upstream/1.9...1.9+b4-1 | filterdiff -x b/debian/"*" -x a/configure | diffstat | tail -1
53 files changed, 932 insertions(+), 466 deletions(-)

~/git/webkit$ git diff upstream... | filterdiff -x b/debian/* | diffstat | tail -1
1 file changed, 4 deletions(-)

Compared to:
~/git/webkit$ git diff upstream...0+svn27674-4 | filterdiff -x b/debian/* | diffstat | tail -1
17 files changed, 61 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)

Somehow, I prefer to work on webkit...

I'm preparing a new upload for WebKit, which will be targetted at unstable. It is much easier to deal with than Gecko, fortunately, so it won't take several months to get something in shape. The main "difficulties" here is that I'm dropping the Qt WebKit package, since this will be provided along Qt, and the upstream build system for the Gtk port switched from qmake to autotools, which is not a really bad thing ; so, nothing impossible.

Note that switching to autotools also means using libtool, which means no way to use -Wl,--as-needed anymore :-/. Yes, libtool, by trying to be smart, puts it almost at the last position in the arguments list, making it useless.

It finally happened, sorry for the delay. 1.9b4 is currently being uploaded to experimental. Yes, I know, this is not 1.9b5, which was released a few days ago. This is because I wanted to do some more work on 1.9b5 and didn't want to delay the upload any longer.

Now, for the uninteresting statistics, following are the diffstats, excluding directory debian/ and configure:

for version 1.8.1.13-1: 113 files changed, 1393 insertions(+), 824 deletions(-)
for version 1.9~b4-1: 53 files changed, 932 insertions(+), 466 deletions(-)
for work in progress version 1.9~b5-1: 39 files changed, 848 insertions(+), 423 deletions(-)

(the latter will obviously evolve)

It smells like an april fool, it looks like an april fool, it tastes like an april fool, but it's not an april fool.

Would there have been a better day than today to announce such a great news ?