Distros and QtWebEngine

[Kevin Kofler]

Raymond Wooninck wrote:
> Isn't this the real main issue with the new QtWebEngine and Chromium
> itself ?? In the past I have been trying to get Chromium to build using
> system version of the 3rd party stuff, but this only worked out for some
> of them. Google didn't just included the 3rd party stuff, but also altered
> it to their needs and some things never got upstreamed.

Yes, this is the main issue, for both Fedora and Debian.

> From what I understood the main reason for Fedora not to provide Chromium
> is the inclusion of the ffmpeg sources. Fedora is not allowed to provide
> binaries nor sources that contain stuff that could have legal
> implications. This was also initially openSUSE's main concern, however the
> legal department of SUSE accepted having the sourcecode on our
> BuildSercie, as long as we did not build any codecs from it that could
> cause these legal issues.

This is also a concern, but it could be fixed the same way as for other 
affected packages, by ripping out the encumbered source code from the 
tarball. That said, having maintained such a cleaning script for xine-lib 
for a while, I am not looking forward to trying to clean FFmpeg that way 
(FFmpeg is not in Fedora at all at this time; for some other packages that 
bundle FFmpeg, we rm -rf the entire FFmpeg, but that is not doable for 
Chromium/QtWebEngine), and the bundling of the forked FFmpeg is also against 
Fedora policies to begin with.

> This situation will not likely change as that there are old bug reports
> regarding this situation and they were never resolved.

And this is exactly why we urge KDE to not require QtWebEngine for anything.

        Kevin Kofler