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

[Dirk Hohndel]

> On Sep 20, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.

So I've spent four hours trying to get QtWebKit from Qt5.5 to compile
with MXE. No joy. None at all. And googling around several of the MXE
developers have tried and given up.

While I wish it wasn't so, I think spending time on making this work is
likely less useful than spending time on switching away from QtWebKit
to QtWebEngine

QtWebEngine is available as of Qt5.4 - and our BT support pretty much
requires Qt5.4. So this may mean that we'll need Qt5.4 or newer in order
to build Subsurface. Easy for Windows and Mac. A major pain for Linux.

Ubuntu 14.04 is on Qt 5.2
Fedora 21 is on Qt 5.3

Gah.

/D