Changes between Version 5 and Version 6 of WebKitGTK/MaintenanceTips

Timestamp:

Mar 22, 2019 1:37:50 PM (5 years ago)

Author:

Michael Catanzaro

Comment:

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WebKitGTK/MaintenanceTips

@@ -49 +49 @@
 === Michael's Strategy
 
-Later on in the lifetime of a stable branch, consider switching to Michael's strategy, which focuses on reviewing the commits that are most likely to be important candidates for backporting. Those are (a) patches that were backported to a Safari stable branch, and (b) patches associated with resolved security bugs.
+Later on in the lifetime of a stable branch, consider switching to Michael's strategy, which focuses on reviewing the commits that are most likely to be important candidates for backporting. Those are (a) patches that were backported to a Safari stable branch, (b) patches associated with resolved security bugs, and of course (c) platform-specific patches.
 
 Safari backports are a good place to start because these patches have been identified as good candidates for backporting by Apple developers. Each WebKitGTK branch has a corresponding Safari stable branch located under [https://trac.webkit.org/browser#webkit/branches webkit/branches]. The corresponding stable branch is one branched shortly before or shortly after a WebKitGTK branch. For example, for webkit-2.22 the corresponding Safari branch was safari-606-branch. For webkit-2.24, the corresponding Safari branch was safari-607-branch. It's worth examining every patch on the corresponding Safari branch to consider whether it would be a good backport for the WebKitGTK branch. Most patches backported to Safari stable branches are also good candidates for WebKitGTK branches, except patches that are Mac-specific or address features that are not yet enabled in the WebKitGTK branch. For example, WebKitGTK 2.24 does not yet support service workers, WebRTC, EME, or PSON, so fixes for these features should be ignored. 
 
 Staying on top of resolved security bugs will make it easier to handle future security advisories. There is a [https://bugs.webkit.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=saved-searches saved search] for resolved security bugs visible only to members of the WebKit security team. It's advisable to review all recently-modified security bugs in this list every week or two and backport anything you see there. This way, you might not need to backport many (or any!) patches when it comes time to release the next security advisory.
+
+Platform-specific patches generally have prefixes like [GTK], [WPE], [SOUP], [FreeType], [GStreamer]. These are often important for backporting. Don't rely on developers to request backport when their commit is important; that often doesn't happen.
 
 === Other Backporting Tips