Bug#1020387: dictionaries-common: Consensus regarding the packaging of the Qt WebEngine hunspell binary dictionaries

[Soren Stoutner]

Honestly, the impact on maintaining the Qt WebEngine packages is negligible.  
The Debian packages have been shipping the binary dictionary conversion tool 
for a long time, which is the biggest piece of the puzzle and has already been 
solved.  Upstream (both Qt and Chromium) have not modified any of this code for 
a long time, and Chromium has stated that it is in maintenance mode, meaning 
they aren't currently planning to make any changes going forward, so nothing 
should need to change with the packaging of that.

All the Qt packages need to do is to continue to ship the code that they have 
been shipping for a long time.  The only difference is that now there is a 
symlink that makes it easy for language packaging to jump between Qt versions 
without needing to update their path to reference the new Qt version, there is 
a virtual package, so they don't need to update their build-depends to 
reference the new Qt version, and the WebEngines now have an environment 
variable set so they know where to look to find the dictionaries that are 
shipped by other packages.

If this were going to be a large maintenance burden on Qt WebEngine packaging 
I could see there being some concern.  But the burden on Qt packagers, myself 
or others, going forward is very minimal.

On Thursday, February 16, 2023 11:22:01 AM MST Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez 
Meyer wrote:
> El jueves, 16 de febrero de 2023 13:42:42 -03 Soren Stoutner escribió:
> > Seeing as this is how Qt WebEngine is designed upstream, I think it is
> > important to support it in Debian.  From my personal perspective, the
> > program I am developing (Privacy Browser) depends on Qt WebEngine and
> > needs
> > spell checking functionality to be viable in Debian.
> > 
> > I have been working with the Qt 5 and 6 WebEngine code base recently and
> > have submitted patches both to Debian and upstream.  My goal is to make
> > the
> > WebEngine packages Lintian free, which is going to require a bit of work,
> > but I am in it for the long haul.  I am also willing to become the
> > maintainer of the WebEngine packages or to co-maintain them with others.
> 
> I'm totally in for this, but then I need to see proves before continue
> exposing internal stuff to third parties. It's very much the same issue with
> private headers.
> 
> I would definitely do not mind to expose this if the Qt project compiles the
> bdic files as part of their build process *and* it's part of their CI
> testing.
> > While I agree that the entire design of the .bdic binary dictionaries is
> > suboptimal, I think that appropriately supporting them in Debian is the
> > best way forward.
> 
> Believe me I try to do the same, but web engines already made me waste too
> much time, so I try to avoid whatever could bring us yet another headache. A
> simple error can easily cost a couple of hours.


-- 
Soren Stoutner
soren at stoutner.com
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