RFC Proposal

texts/RFC_001.md

@@ -0,0 +1,75 @@
+# RFC #001 Webview
+
+| Status        | Proposed       |
+:-------------- | ---------------------------------------------------- |
+| **RFC #**     | [001](https://github.com/tauri-apps/governance-and-guidance/pull/NNN)
+| **Authors** | Daniel Thompson-Yvetot (denjell@tauri.studio), Tensor Programming (tensor@tauri.studio) |
+| **External Sponsor** | Erlend (e.soghe@gmail.com) |
+| **Updated**   | 2020-03-10                                           |
+
+
+## Objective
+We would like to have more direct involvement in the critical upstream libraries upon which Tauri is built.
+
+## Motivation
+Tauri is a project that is heavily reliant on upstream bindings (currently boscop/web-view and zserge/webview). Over the past year there have been spurts of activity in both of these upstream resources, but communication with the lead developers has been challenging.
+
+Furthermore, these two libraries have diverged in their source and approach and it is difficult to know where to contribute, let alone know when PRs will be merged.
+
+Not only are there outstanding features (like [transparent and borderless windows](https://github.com/Boscop/web-view/commit/55f619190e6aa8c54fde8cf72d71a5126238a5e3), [additional menu items](https://github.com/Boscop/web-view/pull/125) etc.), but also [severe memory leaks](https://github.com/Boscop/web-view/issues/79).
+
+Since we plan to release our Beta at some point in the next 4 months, we absolutely cannot carry this kind of architectural debt with us and need to come to a decision within the next 10 days.
+
+## User Benefit
+- Consumers of Tauri will be able to have assurance that we are able to protect and maintain essential code.
+- The open source community at large becomes less fractured and our work will directly support other communities using webviews.
+- Consuming from the "pure" webview source will enable Tauri projects to more easily use other bindings at some point in the future.
+
+## Design Proposal
+
+### In any Case
+We will create generic mappings to the rust bindings, this will allow developers to more easily switch to other forks of webview and potentially other rendering engines entirely.
+
+### Ideal Situation
+We become co-maintainers of the official webview/webview-rs bindings together with @boscop and consume official monolithic webview-x type headers directly from webview/webview
+
+### Acceptable Situation
+We become co-maintainers of webview/webview-rs and consume official monolithic webview-x type headers directly from webview/webview.
+
+### Backup Plan
+We consume webview-x type headers and bind them to tauri-apps/tauri-webview, essentially hard-forking. Contributions back upstream and manual merges from upstream possible, but will require additional effort (and attention).
+
+### Alternatives Considered
+- Writing our own bindings.
+- Doing nothing and waiting.
+
+### Performance Implications
+We expect general improvements across the board.
+
+### Dependencies
+The way this plays out will necessarily impact the dependency tree, but it will be transparent for consumers of Tauri.  Also, some of the C++ dependencies will be easier to consume on certain platforms.
+
+### Engineering Impact
+We expect binary sizes to remain the same and hope to have improved memory management for Windows platforms.
+
+### Platforms and Environments
+This will affect all platforms, but again, it will not affect the way in which Tauri works on a fundamental level.
+
+### Security Impact
+Maintaining some kind of influence over the bindings and the headers needed for properly and safely using webviews will absolutely enhance our security posture.
+
+### Tutorials and Examples
+Since this will mostly concern developers of the library itself, we should anticipate enhancing our own documentation in any case.
+
+### Compatibility
+There may be API changes, but it will fall in the scope of ALPHA.  For information regarding the API changes, refer to the webview repository's [readme](https://github.com/zserge/webview).  We anticipate that MSHtml will not continue to be supported in the ecosystem in favor of Edge and Edge/Chromium.
+
+### User Impact
+We anticipate only forward-changes with additionally exposed APIs.
+
+## Questions and Discussion Topics
+What do you think? Is it going to be better for Tauri to hard fork and go its own way - or be part of the community and work together?
+
+Would you be more willing to contribute to the webview organization or the Tauri organization? (Or doesn't it matter?)
+
+