Revisiting WebkitGtk+ in Balsa



Sorry to revive an old thread…

On 08/29/2016 03:04:07 PM Mon, Albrecht Dreß wrote:
Hi Peter:

Am 29.08.16 00:55 schrieb(en) Peter Bloomfield:
In a recent bug[1], Jeremy Bicha has asked that we remove support for the original webkit widget in Balsa. 
I've been using the new widget in builds from git (gtk3 branch) for a year or two with no issues other than 
those described above. I'm inclined to follow Jeremy's advice, and remove support for the old widget, at 
least in the gtk3 branch. Would this cause problems for anyone?

Looking for the package libwebkit2gtk in the still officially supported Debian based distos:
- Debian wheezy (oldstable, EOL May 2018) does not support it;
- Debian jessie (stable, EOL May 2020) includes libwebkit2gtk-3.0 rev. 2.4.9 and libwebkit2gtk-4.0 rev. 2.6.2;
- Ubuntu precise (12.04LTS, EOL April 2017) does not support it;
- Ubuntu trusty (14.04LTS, EOL April 2019) includes libwebkit2gtk-3.0 2.4..10;
- Ubuntu xenial (16.04LTS, EOL April 2021) includes libwebkit2gtk-3.0 rev.. 2.4.10 and libwebkit2gtk-4.0 rev. 
2.10.9.

They all come with an outdated (2.4.x) balsa version, though.  Therefore, I vote for keeping webkit support 
in Balsa until at least May 2018 (for wheezy), as to enable building balsa 2.5 from source without the need 
to manually build further dependencies.

I'm not sure if it is possible to build the same code against libwebkit2gtk-3.0 and -4.0.  If not, IMO we 
should keep webkit support until the EOL of Ubuntu trusty (i.e. April 2019).

Maybe we could dump a warning from configure when webkit is selected, or add a note in the Readme/install 
instructions (which are *terribly* outdated anyway).

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?

Peter

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