MXE and Qt 5.9.0

[Dirk Hohndel]

> On Jul 30, 2017, at 4:46 PM, Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 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?
> 
> the bundled docs also open inside a web page, which uses WebKit (Help
> -> Documentation)

Forgot about that one.

> this can be easily replaced with opening a URI inside the user's
> preferred web browser.

Which is what we do on mobile, anyway. The difference is that the built in
user manual works when you have no internet (not unusual when on a dive
trip).

>> 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)
> 
> i won't comment on the facebook support as i haven't even tested it.
> i know it opens a webpage inside the settings window.

Yes, I it does.

>> 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?
> 
> on the printing side and for the time being we cannot really get rid
> of the web page renderer dependency if we want to support templates.
> we need a full blown web page renderer for rendering the pages which
> the user wants to print using Grantlee, CSS and HTML templates.
> 
> back in the day we didn't needed any of that because we only had 3-4
> predefined templates (table, 1 dive per page, 4 dives per page..etc).
> 
> if we roll back to that, Grantlee and a web page renderer won't be
> needed, but we limit the user a lot and there will be complains, since
> there are template users out there.
> if we decide to to move away from WebKit or WebView and write our own
> HTML web page renderer, that's a massive task that can take years.
> if we decide to move away from HTML/CSS and write our own language for
> printing templates or some sort of a HTML subset with some predefined
> list of items / widgets to render, we become less user friendly and
> less flexible, and that's not an easy task to write as code either.

None of those options sound appealing. Drat. And I bet there is no
simpler / smaller HTML/CSS capable rendering system.

>> Because quite frankly, I think we'd be better off without needing either WebKit or WebEngine...
> 
> i can agree, but with WebKengine - the HTML printing template support
> needs to go too.

OK, back to the drawing board. Let's see if we can get a newer version
of webkit built for MXE

/D