Re: Revisiting WebkitGtk+ in Balsa



Hi Peter:

Am 26.10.17 21:34 schrieb(en) Peter Bloomfield:
To support Debian wheezy we certainly need to keep webkit1 configurable until next May.

I think we could safely drop Wheezy support, which is “oldoldstable” meanwhile.  If it still in use, probably 
only as server, but not as desktop system.

Ubuntu trusty provides the newer webkit2 widget, but only the early webkit2gtk-3.0 API.

Probably the same situation as for Wheezy…

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.

IMHO we shouldn’t.  Trusty and Wheezy are /so/ close to their EOL that this would be a waste of precious 
lifetime.  And conditionals in general make the code hard to read, maintain and test and thus should be 
avoided if possible.

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.

I guess Paweł will officially release 2.5.4 soon.  Given the release cycle in the past, it is somewhat 
unlikely we will have a 2.5.5 release ready before May 2018.  And as the Debian/Ubuntu people typically do 
not include Git versions, it will thus be safe to require webkit2gtk-4.0.

Debian testing (Buster) and Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful) come with Balsa 2.5.3, btw.  This version still depends 
upon libesmtp.  Libesmtp is apparently not supported any more and contains security flaws.  It would 
therefore be cool if we could get 2.5.4 into Buster and the next Ubuntu LTS (Bionic, 18.04)…

Just my € 09.01, as always!

Cheers,
Albrecht.

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