QWebView and friends are looking for a new maintainer

Now that the Nokia N9 has finally been announced, many of you probably know it ships with a WebKit2-based browser. Following this we've started discussing where to go with WebKit in Qt5, and it has become quite clear that the future of our QtWebKit use-case is with WebKit2.

We at Nokia are planning to cease work on the WebKit1-based API (QWebView, QGraphicsWebView and friends.) We know there are many people using this API, and would therefore like to know if someone is interested in stepping up and taking over its development.

This task would include hosting a buildbot instance for build.webkit.org, and the responsibility for keeping unit tests (Qt/WebKit1 API tests) and layout tests passing.

The rough plan is to ship the last version of our WebKit1 API's with Qt 5.0. We don't intend to update the code after this initial release, as its sole purpose is to ease migration, similarly to Qt3Support in Qt4. This will possibly be a forward-ported version QtWebKit 2.2 (as opposed to a snapshot of WebKit trunk at the time of Qt 5.0 branching.)

If a new maintainer can be found, it's our hope that they could keep delivering new versions of the Qt/WebKit1 API's to the Qt 5.x series.

To avoid confusion, please note that right now we consider our WebKit1 API's "done" as in Thiago's blog post about module maturity levels. We are not removing them from the code base, but also have no plans to develop them further.

Please contact us if you are interested in this, you can find us on the webkit-qt mailing list and in #qtwebkit on the Freenode IRC network.