MXE and Qt 5.9.0

[Dirk Hohndel]

> On Jul 30, 2017, at 2:29 PM, Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 30 July 2017 at 23:21, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>> 5.7 didn't appear to include the esri plugin... That's why I tried to switch to 5.9. And because of the way mxe is organized, that brought with it the switch from GCC 4.x to 5.4 which is what I suspect might be the cause of my problem...
>> 
> 
> https://github.com/qt/qtlocation/tree/5.7
> indeed does not include the ESRI plugin so it's a new addition. but
> maybe you can try building the ESRI plugin with Qt 5.7.
> 
> i was able to build the ESRI plugin locally, here is how:
> 
> i have the official Qt 5.9.0 binary Mingw packages for Windows
> 
> - downloaded this 5.9.0 tree in a zip
> https://github.com/qt/qtlocation/tree/5.9.0
> - extracted it in a folder qtlocation-5.9.0
> - cd qtlocation-5.9.0/src/plugins/geoservices/esri
> - qmake
> - make
> this resulted in .dll and .a files created in:
> qtlocation-5.9.0/plugins/geoservices

I will give this a try,
The other thing that I was thinking about was "why do we need WebKit?"
So part of the argument for keeping WebKit was that WebEngine can't be cross built on Windows.
But then the question becomes, why do we need either?

Right now we have two things that need this functionality: Facebook and Printing.
The Facebook support really isn't all that complicated and it seems ridiculous to have a huge monstrosity like WebKit (27MB on Windows) as part of our binary for that. It's literally 20% of the size of our binary (btw: the second largest piece is icudt56 at 25MB... yikes)
Printing is more complicated. I'm not quite sure how much we really need to have WebKit for that - I remember that you said earlier, Lubomir, that the layout code very much needs some WebKit functionality. But the question seems worth asking - what features do we actually need? What would it take to implement them differently?

Because quite frankly, I think we'd be better off without needing either WebKit or WebEngine...

/D