Re: WebKitGTK+ in Balsa

[Peter Bloomfield <PeterBloomfield bellsouth net>]

Hi Albrecht:

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 They all come with an outdated (2.4.x) balsa version, though.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).

I don't know the difference between libwebkit2gtk-3.0 and libwebkit2gtk-4.0; the webkit2 API was unstable 
during development, so perhaps libwebkit2gtk-3.0 signifies an unstable version. I don't recall whether Balsa 
depended on any part of the API that changed during development; if not, it would probably build against the 
libwebkit2gtk-3.0 package, but I can't test that. Perhaps someone could test the current Balsa gtk3 branch in 
Ubuntu trusty.

> Maybe we could dump a warning from configure when webkit is selected,

Yes, that seems like the least we could do...

> or add a note in the Readme/install instructions (which are *terribly* outdated anyway).

Patch, anyone?

Best,

Peter