Debian, (Py)Qt5 and QtWebKit

[Florian Bruhin]

* Kovid Goyal <kovid at kovidgoyal.net> [2016-01-25 14:25:01 +0530]:
> Realistically speaking, the job of replacing WebKit with WebEngine
> everywhere it is used is impossible. It would take man years of effort
> with no reward -- other than causing regressions for end users and bug
> reports for maintainers. WebEngine is only a direct replacement for
> WebKit in the most superficial of use cases.  
> 
> As for the use of WebKit in calibre, in the short-to-medium term it will
> remain as is, and I will probably have to end up maintaining Qt WebKit
> for myself. I will make this work public, as I did for the Visual Studio
> 2015 compatible fork of python that I maintain. So other users of Qt
> WebKit can benefit from it and hopefully help with maintaining it. 

There's also an effort going on to update QtWebKit to a newer upstream
WebKit code base here:

https://github.com/annulen/webkit/wiki
https://github.com/annulen/webkit/commits/qtwebkit-1
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-qt/2016-January/004037.html

This sounds quite promising to me so far - maybe it'd make more sense
to contribute to that (and for Linux distributions, maybe to package
that in the future)?

> In the longer term I plan to gradually phase out use of Qt WebKit in
> calibre. However, this is likely to be a very long drawn out affair.
> Some things can be replaced by WebEngine *relatively* painlessly, such
> as the use of WebKit in the viewer and editor. Others, such as the use
> of WebKit for a headless, JS enabled automated browser in the calibre
> recipe system and for the rendering of HTML to PDF will be much harder,
> requiring the aforementioned man-years of effort.

I think PhantomJS[1] came to the same conclusion and started
contributing to the above QtWebKit repo.

[1] http://phantomjs.org/

Florian

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