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

[Andres Salomon]

Related to this - we got approval for chromium to ship in bookworm 
(#1004441). That doesn't necessarily mean it'll be in future releases 
(trixie or whatever), of course, but if it's easier for the dependency 
chain; I'm open to discussing having chromium provide it.

I haven't followed all of this very long thread, so it may be 
irrelevant at this point. :)



On Thu, Feb 16 2023 at 11:51:09 AM -0700, Soren Stoutner 
<soren at stoutner.com> wrote:
> 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