Re: Revisiting WebkitGtk+ in Balsa

[Jack <ostroffjh users sourceforge net>]

Hello Peter,
On 2017.10.26 15:34, Peter Bloomfield wrote:
[snip...]
> The warning about webkit1 has been in place since that discussion (in  
> git master, now that development has moved there). To support Debian  
> wheezy we certainly need to keep webkit1 configurable until next May.  
> Ubuntu precise is past its EOL, so no longer an issue. Ubuntu trusty  
> provides the newer webkit2 widget, but only the early webkit2gtk-3.0  
> API.
>
> Balsa support for webkit2 initially used that API, before upgrading  
> to the webkit2gtk-4.0 API. I looked at the commit that implemented  
> the upgrade, and it's not very extensive; I believe we could build  
> with either API by using the magic of conditional compilation. It  
> would add some minor complication to configure.ac and some #ifdef  
> stuff in one C file (libbalsa/html.c), but that seems like a small  
> cost for enabling Ubuntu trusty users to migrate from the insecure  
> old widget to the newer one, and allowing Balsa to drop webkit1  
> support next May.
>
> Opinions?
I don't know that my opinion should carry much weight, but even worse,  
I'm of a really mixed opinion here.  Supporting a major distribution is  
good, given that there is a definite end in sight.  However, the other  
project I'm most heavily involved with (KMyMoney, a personal finance  
app) seems to have already been dropped by some distros as part of  
their dropping support for KDE4 libraries.  (The KMyMoney team is  
working on the migration to KDE Frameworks and Qt5, but isn't release  
ready yet.)   That's perhaps worse, in that it makes an app unavailable  
for a given distro, rather than just restricting users to a perhaps not  
most recent version.

Given that wheezy is LTS, am I correct that there is not much active  
development or new versions of things, just bug fixes?  If so, might it  
be possible/reasonable to create a git branch which retains webkit1  
support, while dropping it from master.  Any significant bug fixes can  
be back-ported, and a tarball created from that branch for wheezy, if  
necessary.  I suppose it really depends on how much effort it will take  
to support all versions of webkit until next May.  It sounds like  
adding the IF's for conditional compilation isn't too hard, but will  
there be an other enhancements that will be harder or even prohibitive  
to implement in webkit1?  Yes, all could be wrapped in conditionals,  
but is it worth the effort?  It's really up to the folks who actuall  
muck about in the code.


Jack