Re: WebKitGTK+ in Balsa

[Peter Bloomfield <PeterBloomfield bellsouth net>]

On 08/28/2016 07:21:08 PM Sun, Jack Ostroff wrote:
...
> I must say that the version numbering of of webkitgtk (and which version of gtk+ it works with) has been 
> somewhat confusing, which doesn't help. Gentoo separates by slots.  Slot 2 and slot 3 both have 2.4.11 but 
> different builds.  Slot 4 has 2.10.9 (stable) and 2.12.3 (currently marked testing).
>
> Would it be reasonable (and reasonably possible) as a first step, to add a warning if you choose the older 
> version that it is considered deprecated and probably has un-patched security vulnerabilities, especially 
> depending on the distribution?  Also to make the gtk3 branch default to webkit2.
>
> It seems to me there are two sorts of folks who compile balsa from source.  First is those who are compiling 
> for inclusion in a distribution.  Hopefully, they will pay more attention to security issues, and if that 
> distribution has an old original webkit, they will use the new one with the gtk3 branch.  Of course that 
> might depend on when we release the gtk3 version as master, and relegate the old master to either deprecated 
> or bugs only.  The other folks who compile, are likely looking for the latest and greatest (or on a distro 
> like Gentoo) and will likely already be on gtk3 branch with webkit2.
>
> However, if nobody else has any reason to keep the old option around any longer, then go ahead and just 
> remove it.  (I still need to recompile webkit2 (I somehow think it has a different name on Gentoo, but I'm on 
> vacation, and don't have access to my main PC) since I accidentally deleted it, and am for the interim 
> actually using the old webkit.

Yes, the numbering is kinda hard to follow! If you configure --with-html-widget = webkit2, Balsa (gtk3 
branch) looks for webkit2gtk-4.0.pc for the pkg-config info. On Fedora 24, that file is provided by 
webkitgtk4-devel-2.12.4-1.fc24.x86_64. So you could use that configure option if your WebKitGTK package 
provides webkit2gtk-4.0.pc .

I haven't built WebKitGTK from source, but my impression was that the build would provide both the old and 
the new widget, and presumably both *.pc files--is that not the way it works?

Peter