Policy regarding QtWebKit and QtScript

[Niels Ole Salscheider]

Hi,

On Saturday, 5 March 2016, 08:09:22 CET, Thomas Friedrichsmeier wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 25 Dec 2015 12:42:26 +0100
> 
> Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de> wrote:
> > Sorry, but how is "it takes long to compile" and argument for or
> > against a piece of software if there is no feature equivalent
> > alternative that takes less time to compile?
> > 
> > Qt WebEngine is far easier to compile than Qt WebKit in my
> > experience, and it certainly doesn't take significantly longer. And
> > of course the former is far superior than the latter.
> 
> I'm late to this thread, I know. But in fact on Windows the situation
> is arguably a bit worse: QtWebEngine can _only_ be compiled using (free
> as in beer) MSVC 2013. In particular, MinGW is explicitly _not_
> supported.
> 
> This is not only an uncomfortable situation for a free software project
> to be in. If you're trying to interface with third libraries that
> happen to be MinGW-only, for various reasons, it can be between
> no-fun-at-all, and downright incompatibility. Remember, the C++-ABI is
> just not compatible between MinGW and MSVC.

I agree that this is a bad situation. Are there any plans from upstream to fix 
this at some point?

> I have no idea how hard it would be to resolve this (it is rumored to
> be hard), but until it is, I would advise KDE projects to be very
> reluctant about moving away from QtWebKit, unless and until they have
> very compelling reason to do so. For use cases such as "display some
> trusted local HTML files", I think QtWebKit is still the tool of choice.

The problem with QtWebKit really is that it probably has many vulnerabilities 
that are fixed in upstream WebKit but where the fixes are not backported. 
It would probably be ok to use it for "trusted local HTML" but I am not sure 
how many cases there are where you can guarantee this. And using QtWebKit half 
of the time and QtWebEngine for the other half does not necessarily solve your 
Windows problem.

Btw, do we already have an official policy regarding QtWebEngine? There are 
already KDE applications using it, but is it ok to hard-depend on it or should 
it be optional for now?

> Regards
> Thomas