[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#784451: [ball] Qt4's WebKit removal

[Ana Guerrero Lopez]

Source: ball
Version: 1.4.2+20140406-1
Severity: wishlist
User: debian-qt-kde at lists.debian.org
Usertags: qt4webkit-removal

Dear Debian Med Packaging Team <debian-med-packaging at lists.alioth.debian.org>,

As you might know we the Qt/KDE team are preparing to remove Qt4's WebKit
as announced in [announce].

[announce] <https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/05/msg00001.html>

Basically we are about to get the latest Qt4 point release and upstream is
migrating from WebKit to Bing in the Qt5 series, so we won't have much upstream
support for maintaining Qt4's WebKit.

In order to make this move, all packages directly or indirectly depending on
the Qt4's WebKit library have to either get ported to Qt5 or eventually get
removed from the Debian repositories.

Therefore, please take the time and:
- contact your upstream (if existing) and ask about the state of a Qt5
port of your application
- if there are no activities regarding porting, investigate whether there are
suitable alternatives for your users
- if there is a Qt5 port that is not yet packaged, consider packaging it
- if both the Qt4 and the Qt5 versions already coexist in the Debian
archives, consider removing the Qt4 version

= Porting =

Some of us where involved in various Qt4 to Qt5 migrations [migration] and we
know for sure that porting stuff from Qt4 to Qt5 is much much easier and less
painful than it was from Qt3 to Qt4.

We also understand that there is still a lot of software still using Qt4. In
order to ease the transition time we have provided Wheezy backports for Qt5.

Don't forget to take a look at the C++ API changes page [apichanges] whenever
you start porting your application.

[migration] http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/packagingqtstuff.html
[apichanges] http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/sourcebreaks.html

For any questions and issues, do not hesitate to contact the Debian Qt/KDE
team at debian-qt-kde at lists.debian.org

Ana,
on behalf of the Qt4 maintainers