While I was unable to actually attend Begeistert this time around, I was nonetheless able to take some time off work to join in on the traditional during/post-BG code sprint. As per usual, this revolved around improving our integrated debugger.
After a nice short walk through the light drizzle of the slowly condensing mist that completely shrouded the top of Düsseldorf’s landmark Rhine Tower, I arrived pretty early at the Youth Hostel. Entering our conference room I was greeted by its single occupant: Matthias, who I haven’t seen at a BeGeistert for some years. We were chatting while I was setting up my gear and one by one more people entered our conference room. Most of them coming from breakfast; they already arrived the day before. I was glad to see most of the regular core developers did manage to come to BeGeistert after all!
Hello everyone!
This week is a bit special, as it closes the first year of my contract with Haiku. I wish to thank everyone for their support through donations, bug reports, comments on these articles, and general support for my work. I hope this will continue into next year.
This was again a rather busy week, but there was not much work on WebKit itself. I’ll keep the breakdown I used last week (haiku/haikuports/webkit) as it seems to work well.
Hello world!
This has been a busy week with activity on all fronts.
Hello world!
Localekit and ICU migration Last week I wrote the report while I was debugging a deadlock in ICU 53.1. I spent some time debugging this and I found the issue. ICU calls native functions to handle some aspects of timezones (tzset, localtime, and a few others). However on Haiku we implement these functions using ICU. This didn’t work too well as ICU tried to lock a lock it was already holding during the initialization of timezone data.
Hello world!
So, one of the changes made last week (the XMLHTTPRequest timeout support) led to an API breakage in the network kit. This made WebKit crash on starting WebPositive, and I had to make an “emergency” release during the weekend to fix this. While you can enjoy the new shiny features and the bugfixes, you will also notice it is rather slow and uses a lot of CPU. This is a known issue related to the fixes with redrawing frames, which needed to remove some optimizations. I’ll try to reintroduce those in a way that doesn’t involve drawing problems.
Hello everyone!
This week most of my work went into improving our HTML5 support in WebKit. A lot of small issues and relatively simple features had piled up on my TODO list, and there weren’t too much new bug reports so I spent some time to fix those. Here is a quick review of the features I added support for this week.
Hello everyone!
As usual, after the 1.4.4 release there were some new bug reports for me to work on. So the first part of the week was spent investigating and fixing some of those.
- Several problems were fixed in the video code, which are leading to deadlocks and/or crashes of WebKit after a video is done playing.
- A problem with text not being drawn (seen for example on Trac) was fixed. This is apparently a new bug introduced on WebKit side, where small text with shadows ends up not being drawn at all. I'm not sure my fix is completely correct, but it seems to work.
Update: Jessica raised the funds she needs, thanks to everyone who supported her!
Just a quick note to mention that Jessica Hamilton is raising money to fund a trip to this year’s GSoC Reunion. She was one of our selected mentor delegates assigned to attend.
It turns out that the reimbursements from Google are not going to be enough to cover all of her travel costs, and she otherwise can’t afford to go.
Hello there!
Yesterday I released version 1.4.4 of HaikuWebKit. This version includes the latest fixes to the rendering code and should be completely useable again. There are still a few drawing issues but they shouldn’t prevent you to browse the web anymore.
