Distros and QtWebEngine

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Monday 20 April 2015, Vadim Zhukov wrote:
> 2015-04-20 19:28 GMT+03:00 Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez 
<perezmeyer at gmail.com>:
> > Hi everyone! I'm one of Debian's Qt maintainers and I'm writing here due
> > to the problem that QtWebEngine poses for us distros (in this case, at
> > least Debian and Fedora).
> > 
> > I know that kdepim seems to depend on it now. Sadly QtWebEngine it's
> > quite a hard (very hard) piece of software to package.
> > 
> > It embeds quite a lot of 3rd party stuff which we distros don't accept
> > (in different grades depending on the distro) as we require to build
> > using the system versions. Fedora's Rex Dieter tells me that's actually
> > why chromium is not available for them.
> > 
> > Moreover we can't build debugging symbols on most archs due to the
> > enormous amount of RAM+swap it involves in the linking process (more
> > than 8GB last time I checked). This is at least the same as QtWebKit,
> > but seems to be getting worse.
> > 
> > Yes, we do understand that QtWebEngine is technically superior to any
> > other thing out there but making that code an acceptable package is
> > another thing.
> > 
> > So basically what I'm trying to say is: don't expect us down streamers to
> > easily package QtWebEngine soon, if we ever get to it.
> > 
> > I'm really sorry if this comes as "bad news", but the reality is
> > currently this :(
> 
> And if such large-community distros like Debian and Fedora have
> issues, what to say about smaller ones? Also, QtWebEngine isn't ported
> outside of Linux, Windows and MacOS X at all.
> 
> I'm an OpenBSD developer, maintaining almost all Qt and KDE ports for
> now. And I can clearly say that I won't ever start working on
> QtWebEngine: chromium port in OpenBSD (maintained by a different
> person) already has 285 (sic!) local patches, so QtWebEngine will need
> at least as much. That's, obviously, too much. So until something
> changes, there will be no KF5-based PIM on OpenBSD.
> 
> I'm not in favor of using outdated QtWebkit module either: it's likely
> full of security holes, so it's not the thing you want to throw
> incoming email at.
> 
QtWebKit is not outdated yet. And security is least of problems when it starts 
getting older. The main problem is that it is slowly losing the ability to 
show modern webpages. The first causality was YouTube TV mode and anything 
else depending on Media Stream Extensions. More will join those once age sets 
in, but for EMail or wikipedia;  I think QtWebKit should be fine for a few 
years yet, especially for applications that continued to use Qt4.8 QtWebKit 
until recently.

Anyway, QtWebEngine runs a patched fork of chromium, and while we don't 
support OpenBSD, you are welcome to contribute patches to us.

Regards
`Allan