Debian, (Py)Qt5 and QtWebKit

[Scott Kitterman]

On Monday, January 25, 2016 08:12:02 AM Florian Bruhin wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> (Cc'ing Kovid/Detlev because I think they'll be impacted by this
> as well as the upstreams of Eric/Calibre, Cc'ing Axel Beckert because
> I'm working with him for the package mentioned later in this mail)

OK, kept them in CC.

> I'd like to discuss the future of Qt5's QtWebKit (and PyQt's bindings
> for it) in Debian. Looking at the Qt 5.6 beta, it seems like Qt
> upstream will definitely remove QtWebKit - not only from the binary
> releases, but from source releases as well.

As far as PyQt5 goes, I expect we'll support it as long as upstream does and 
Debian is shipping Qt5 WebKit (which I don't maintain, so I won't address).

> As it's likely many packages will still need a Qt5 QtWebKit, and based
> on [1] ("Qt5's WebKit is expected to stay supported until Qt6") it
> looks like Debian will still continue to support it, if necessary
> building from upstream's git[2]?
> 
> As for the PyQt5 wrappers for QtWebKit, upstream says[3]:
>     > AIUI, they are still providing source releases.  You're going to
>     > continue to support that, right?
> 
>     Yes, if they are part of the official release. If not then I won't
>     do anything to break things, but they won't be officially
>     supported.
> 
> I'm planning to open an ITP for my project[4] using PyQt and
> (currently) QtWebKit soon, and I'm guessing for at least Eric[5] and
> Calibre[6] this is a problem as well.
> 
> Will Debian also support PyQt's QtWebKit until Qt 6 if possible?
> If not, what will happen with the packages which depend on it?

I think that is the goal.  WebKit (and support for it in PyQt4) are, however, 
definitely going away sooner rather than later.

Scott K