QtWebKit is deprecated [was: Re: detecting Windows 10 [was: Re: [PATCH] Fix Bluetooth address truncation]]

Lubomir I. Ivanov neolit123 at gmail.com
Sun Sep 20 12:47:50 PDT 2015


On 20 September 2015 at 22:16, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 10:18:36AM -0700, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
>>
>> I forgot to upgrade the build server for the Windows binaries to Qt5.5 :-(
>>
>> Grmbl. Doing that right now... there may be a Beta 3 quicker than expected.
>
> Or not. MXE no longer builds QtWebKit by default (because it can't be
> built statically) and when enabled the build fails and as usual looking
> at the build output tells me absolutely nothing.
>
> Googling some more of course immediately arrives at "oh, QtWebKit is
> deprecated in Qt5.4 and later".
>
> Which leads me to go "<censored>"
>
> So we really want to build with Qt5.5 for several of the features we use
> (especially BT), but we also rely on a component that is deprecated in
> Qt5.5 and no longer built on one of our platforms and the idiot maintainer
> didn't notice this until after releasing Beta 2.
>
> So now what? Switch to QtWebEngine way into the beta cycle?
>
> From what I can tell the only point where we need QtWebKit is printer.cpp
> (which is why I'm even bringing this up)... how hard would it be to not
> need QtWebKit???
>
> I can't begin to express how frustrated I am with myself right now.
>

bummer; that was unexpected...
i completely didn't notice that as well, because i'm sort of stuck
(out of laziness) with Qt5.3 on my setup and expected Qt to stick with
WebKit for a while.

so i have a question here: is it wise to make Qt5.5 an absolute
requirement for all target platforms - e.g. all Linux distros and so
on?
for Windows and OSX i guess it's fine as the packages are self-contained.

if so, we need some of this for the printing module:
https://wiki.qt.io/Porting_from_QtWebKit_to_QtWebEngine
looking at what has to be done it seems simple, but who know if it
*just works*...

on the other hand i see some comments here about Qt keeping QtWebKit
for a while i.e. until 6.0 at least:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29055475/qwebview-or-qwebengineview

"According to the Qt 5.4 release announcement, WebKit support will be
deprecated in 5.5 and no new features will be added. Realistically
it's unlikely they'll remove it entirely until Qt 6, because that
would (obviously) break binary compatibility."

so the second question is: instead of opening a possible can of worms
before the new Subsurface release, how about finding a way to build
QtWebKit with Qt5.5 (e.g. MXE)?

https://wiki.qt.io/New-Features-in-Qt-5.5#Deprecated_Functionality
"These modules are still included in the Qt 5.5 release, but
considered for removal in the future releases of Qt"

if that's problematic, Gehad needs to find time to test QtWebEngine on
his setup.
if he's out of free time i need to find free time to install Qt5.5 and
test QtWebEngine.

lubomir
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