Bug 242407 – [WPE] Decide if WPE will continue to support 1.0 and 1.1 API versions

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: FIXED
• Component: WPE WebKit

[Michael Catanzaro]

WebKitGTK is developing a new webkit2gtk-5.0 API version with compatibility with GTK 4. As part of this, we'll surely want to introduce a corresponding WPE API as well, likely either wpewebkit-1.2 or wpewebkit-2.0, to stay in match with GTK.

WebKitGTK needs to retain compatibility for its existing API versions webkit2gtk-4.0 and webkit2gtk-4.1 indefinitely, so the original code is not going anywhere. Accordingly, it's not very hard to keep wpewebkit-1.0 and wpewebkit-1.1 working. However, since fewer applications use WPE WebKit, I bet we can get away with removing the older APIs and forcing applications to upgrade to the latest API version, which will simplify things a little. I suspect most people using WPE only have a small number of applications that they care about. The differences between API versions should not be very big (see bugs blocking bug #210100), and it should probably be an easy upgrade for most applications.

This bug report is for WPE port maintainers to discuss and let me know what you want to do: whether to keep the existing wpewebkit-1.0 and 1.1 APIs, or get rid of them. (Also, if you have a preference between -1.2 vs. -2.0 API version, bikeshedding is welcome.)

[Michael Catanzaro]

If Igalia does not have any preference, I'll remove the older API versions, and arbitrarily choose -1.2 as the next version.

[Michael Catanzaro]

Adrian says we're not quite ready to remove the -1.0 and -1.1 API versions, so decision is to keep them. This bug report was here to make a decision, so -> FIXED.

[Adrian Perez]

Personally I would prefer to remove API 1.0 at some point, but we need
to give it some time. Right now some distributors are not yet shipping
libsoup3, needed for API 1.1. For example Buildroot does not even have
a package for it right now, and Yocto has libsoup3-3.0.7 in the devel
branch but IIUC there is no release yet that includes it.

So I think the way to go is decide about a sensible timeline to remove
the libsoup2 support, write an explainer email, send it to webkit-wpe@,
webkit-gtk@, and selected distribution channels to gather feedback, then
make a final decision about the exact timeline. We can probably remove
wpewebkit-1.0 a bit earlier than webkit2gtk-4.0, though!

[Michael Catanzaro]

Maybe I'll remove -1.1 but not -1.0, is that OK? Otherwise, we'd need to add a new build option to distinguish between -1.1 and the new API. Doesn't seem to be need for it.

(In reply to Michael Catanzaro from comment #1)
> If Igalia does not have any preference, I'll remove the older API versions,
> and arbitrarily choose -1.2 as the next version.

Adrian has requested -2.0 as the next version, so let's use that.