On 2017-05-27 23:49, Moritz Mühlenhoff wrote: > The "browser exception" applies to Chromium and Firefox, which are > standalone packages (sans a few addons breaking), but unless webkit > provides a long term branch with API stability guarantees, that's > not a workable. "Rebase to a new 2.x branch every six months and let's > hope that it doesn't break any rdeps" is not a workable solution.
webkit2gtk does guarantee API stability. "We support each major Debian version until one year after the release of the next major version." https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKitGTK/DependenciesPolicy I'm actually writing this e-mail from a web-based e-mail client using the latest stable release of webkit2gtk (2.16.13) that I just built for Debian jessie (which ships 2.6.2). What webkit2gtk cannot guarantee is zero regressions between stable releases, and there have been a couple of annoying ones. So yes, it can happen that updating webkit2gtk breaks an rdep (#855103). Unfortunately it can also happen that NOT updating webkit2gtk breaks an rdep (#862156). The good news is that the first kind of problems are detected and fixed immediately, so waiting a couple of weeks before uploading the releases to debian-security could be an option (is that what Ubuntu does?). Berto