1264155 - Remove more Gecko for iOS code

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Widget, defect, P5)

Description

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

widget/uikit is for the iOS build. It was added in bug 1171113. As far as I know it's never been used, and isn't even allowed under the Apple app store rules. And we have a separate Firefox implementation on iOS anyway.

So it's a maintenance burden -- people working on widget/ changes have to try to update it appropriately -- and is unlikely to be ever shipped.

Ted, I understand you put the effort in. What do you think about removing it? I certainly may have some of the details wrong...

Comment 1

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I do not want to remove this. Yes, we're not shipping it, but we're leaving this open as an avenue for exploration. I'm fine with people not making changes to it if they don't want to, but having it in-tree lessens the support burden immeasurably. (I've maintained this as a patch queue in the past and it's awful.)

Comment 2

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

I agree with Ted, there's no requirement for a developers to maintain the uikit code (though filing a bug when it gets broken would be useful)

Comment 3

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

FWIW: I'm working on some widget/ changes and I'm doing my best to modify widget/uikit/ appropriately, using grep to find the relevant change points, because I can't bring myself to deliberately break it.

At least I don't have to do likewise with widget/qt/ any more...

Comment 4

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

Getting this off my plate for now, but if someone wants to look at this, here's a list of tasks:

• remove the code involving MOZ_WIDGET_UIKIT
• remove widget/uikit
• remove some more uikit related stuff: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=uikit&case=false&regexp=false&path=
• potentially look at the commit history and check what else is iOS related :)

Comment 5

[Nika Layzell [:nika] (ni? for response)]

We are planning to re-land iOS support using BrowserEngineKit, so closing as we no longer intend to remove it.