As the developer of an app that depends heavily upon Apple’s WebKit technologies, I have often been grateful that the software is open source. It is by no means easy to wrap one’s head around, but when faced with a vexing problem, I can browse, even build and run a custom copy of WebKit on my system, to step through code and try to reason more clearly about its behavior. I’ve even filed my share of bug reports and patches.
While I am very interested in the evolution of WebKit, I am even more concerned with the evolution of OS X. For this reason, I typically install OS X beta releases far earlier than many of my colleagues. This gives me the opportunity to work day to day with the latest changes coming from Apple, and makes it that much more likely I will spot issues with my apps, concerns with the OS, etc., before my customers do.
As an open source project, I initially believed I could build and run WebKit wherever I choose. After all, isn’t that what “open source” is supposed to be all about? But ah, there’s a catch. At least when it comes to building and running WebKit on OS X releases, there is a dependency on a small, binary-only static library which provides key system-specific linkages to WebKit. Usually this binary is added to the open source project around the time the system release goes public, but not much sooner.
The long and short of it? If you want to build WebKit and you don’t work at Apple, you need to do so from publicly released versions of OS X.
For years, I have found this personally annoying, but also philosophically distasteful. It seems like a problem for Apple, too: it’s in their best interest to have as many WebKit developers as possible staying up to date, building the latest versions, testing, submitting patches, etc. And it’s in their interest to have as many OS X developers running the latest betas of the OS, providing feedback, preparing their apps for the public, etc.
A single developer, with a single Mac, running a single installation of OS X cannot simultaneously be a diligent, interested WebKit developer and a dedicated OS X beta tester. This seems like a problem to me, so I finally reported a bug. Radar 21703162: “Beta OS X releases should facilicate building/running WebKit from source.”