QtWebKit in Qt5.6+ in Debian

[Florian Bruhin]

* Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer <perezmeyer at gmail.com> [2015-06-25 09:49:29 -0300]:
> On Thursday 25 June 2015 14:13:59 Florian Bruhin wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > first of all, I hope it's okay I mail you directly because of this - I
> > didn't feel like this is appropriate for a bug report.
> 
> It's appropiate for our team's -talk list, which I'm CCing right now :)

Whah, I'm even subscribed there - sorry I didn't think of that!

> > Seeing that Qt removes QtWebKit from their source- 
> 
> Actually they are not going to update it anymore, maybe except for security 
> bugfixes. The source will remain there and should be able to keep building 
> with Qt5.6+

I'm not entirely sure it will, unfortunately.

From [1]:

* We’d still remove the deprecated modules from our Qt 5.6 release
  (maybe with the exception of Qt Script).

I also remember reading somewhere explicitely that it won't be
included in the qt-everywhere-opensource-... archive - sadly I can't
find the mail anymore.

I asked in IRC (#qt-labs on Freenode) to clarify this, and even there
it seems people aren't sure what will happen exactly ;)

    <The-Compiler> Did I understand it correctly that the QtWebKit source won't be part of the qt-everywhere-opensource tarball with Qt 5.6 anymore? Or will it just be removed from binary builds?
    <aholza> hehe no it still resists in the source folder
    <The-Compiler> I'm pretty sure I read in some mail it doesn't, but I might have misread then
    <The-Compiler> [1] only talks about "removing" it
    <The-Compiler> carewolf? ^
    <carewolf> The-Compiler: don't know. I think it was mostly the binary builds, but it could end up as separate tarball.

[1] http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2015-June/022004.html

> > and binary
> > distributions starting with Qt 5.6[1] and there's nobody stepping up
> > to package QtWebEngine for Debian so far, what are Debian's plans for
> > QtWebEngine after 5.6 has been released upstream?
> 
> Not packaging it at all. See [lwn]. Properly packaging it in Debian means 
> almost a fork, or in other words, a nightmare. Just consider that it bundles 
> ffmped and most possibly a patched ffmpeg...
> 
> [lwn] https://lwn.net/Articles/643423/

I still have some hope - I think Qt will still apply at least security
fixes for QtWebKit until Qt 6, which still should be a while away.

Maybe some miracle happens in that time ;)

> > If Debian were to drop QtWebKit when it's dropped upstream, that'll
> > mean there is no Qt web rendering engine in the Debian repos - also,
> > of course there are a lot of packages which need QtWebKit.
> 
> We don't plan to drop it soon, but we might be forced at some point :(
> 
> Yes, we know the situation sucks, but there is not much we can do about
> this :(

Yeah... I'm contributing to QtWebKit a bit[2] and I completely
understand they're lacking the manpower to maintain this beast in the
long run.

The series of patches they have on top of Chromium look a lot more
sane. But I see how having what's essentially a Chromium fork is
problematic :-/

[2] https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/q/project:qt/qtwebkit+owner:%22Florian+Bruhin+%253Cqt-project.org%2540the-compiler.org%253E%22,n,z

Florian

-- 
http://www.the-compiler.org | me at the-compiler.org (Mail/XMPP)
   GPG: 916E B0C8 FD55 A072 | http://the-compiler.org/pubkey.asc
         I love long mails! | http://email.is-not-s.ms/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-kde-talk/attachments/20150625/7527b84a/attachment.sig>