Monday, 6 February 2017

Frontend maintainership

At the recent NetSurf developer weekend[1] we discussed many topics
one of which was our regular review of the frontends.

Except for Amiga and GTK none of the frontends have a active maintainer.

The cocoa and atari frontends are however causing a great deal of concern.

cocoa - Unless a maintainer can be found (or at least someone willing
to fix it) before 11th Febuarary 2017 the CI for this target
will be disabled. The code will be removed during the next
developer weekend on the 10th June.

This decision has been made because the effort to keep this
frontend building is large and we have many reports that the
resulting binary simply crashes when started.

atari - The atari frontend is built for m68k and coldfire variants
using a variant of the netsurf cross compliation
toolchain/sdk. No serious updates have been made to this
toolchain in some time and it has become a burden.

Unless this is addressed before the next developer weekend the
frontend will be disabled in the CI and subsequently code
removed.

riscos - Still lacks a full time maintainer but due to its userbase
the team keeps it working. Gets a reprieve again and will be
reconsidered next time.

windows - Lacks a full maintainer but has been fixed up to be at least
useful. A maintainer for this frontend would be welcome.

amiga - Chris Young continues to provide excellent maintainership no
problems noted.

monkey - test frontend is useful and we envisage expanding the scope
of its usage.

beos - The Beos port is generally only tested on Haiku at this
point. The frontend is kept useful by mmu man and
pulkomandy. Main issues revolve around the CI slave and its
crashy java port.

gtk - Vince looks after this and despite gtk+ changing API a lot it
remains useful.

framebuffer - generally good shape but the Linux framebuffer and input
need attention. It has been agreed we will look into
using libinput to improve this area.

[1] http://wiki.netsurf-browser.org/developer-weekend/feb-2017/

--
Regards Vincent
http://www.kyllikki.org/

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