Re: [Geary] port to WebKit 2?

[Daniel Fore <daniel elementaryos org>]

Hey everyone,

So we actually didn't do the webkit2 port just yet. We did the native widgets port first so we could minimize the use of the webview. As far as the conversation view goes, I think the only use of granite is because we have an avatar widget in granite trunk (bzr term for master) these days.

This is working very well for us, using only native Gtk widgets. Gtk.CSS is really powerful these days and with a couple revealers and such we still have all the nice animations and features like collapsing and that. We are currently including a basic stylesheet so that it doesn't look too awful in other themes.

We have indeed been trying to migrate code from Geary code style to elementary code style. It just makes things a little nicer for developers at elementary who are bouncing from project to project. I've personally done a lot of work trying to get rid of things like the PillHeaderBar. I think it just makes the code really hard to read and is a bit over-engineered.

We technically have an elementary developer mailing list, but honestly nobody uses it. Everything is done in Slack these days. I've sent invites to Mike and Adam. Let me know if anyone else would like invites. We're more than happy to chat about things that might be useful for you folks.

The really big thing that we've been on lately is actually to port Mail over to an Evolution Data Server backend. We've been doing work upstream on completing GObject Introspection for LibCamel and one of our guys has some ideas about making the API a bit nicer in general. He's had a lot of success pushing branches already, so that's great. One of our other guys is working on a little prototype app before we try to actually make the conversion. You can see the code for that here: https://github.com/matzipan/eds-sample

Let me know if you have any questions about Mail and I'll do my best to try to address them :)

On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 8:59 AM, Cassidy James Blaede <cassidy elementary io> wrote:

The native widgets seem to be working  out really well in Pantheon Mail, and it's nice to not have to reinvent the wheel when GTK+ has a lot of nice things (like animations) built in these days.

I'm CCing Daniel Foré in on this thread so he can chime in; he is more familiar with the Pantheon Mail codebase than I and can probably direct you to the right places. :)

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016, 9:24 PM Michael Gratton <mike vee net> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 7:20 AM, Adam Dingle <adam medovina org> wrote:
>
>>
>>> Hopefully we can find another workaround.  The best fix, however,
>>> will probably be to port to WebKit 2, i.e. WebKit 2.10 or 2.12:
>>>
>>> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=728002
>>>
>>> Do you think you'll have time to take this on?  It might be a nice
>>> little starter project to help you get up to speed on the codebase.
>>>  :)
>>
>> Yeah, I've been thinking about the need to port to WebKit2 for a
>> while. As everyone keeps on pointing out though, it's a big task
>> (shared lib with DBus API) and seems to have some limitations (not
>> being able to reasonably embed GTK+ widgets any more[0]), so I'm
>> wondering if the current approach is still the best way to do it any
>> longer.
>>
>> If GSK were ready to go, I would suggest that might make for a more
>> appropriate way to build the conversation UI. With a reasonably
>> low-tech use of WebKit2, perhaps with an individual WebKitWebView
>> per message, then we may not need much or any IPC between the WebKit
>> process and the main Geary process. We would also be able to embed
>> GTK widgets in the convo view, and further it would fix some weird
>> interactions with the current view, like Select All also including
>> the header chrome and contact avatar.
>>
>> However GSK didn't make 3.20 as ebassi was originally planning, and
>> I don't know what its current status is, so maybe that means looking
>> into using Clutter instead?
>>
>> What do you (and everyone else) think?
>
> Mike, unfortunately I haven't looked into this enough to have an
> informed opinion.  I don't actually understand why we'd need to use
> either GSK or Clutter - a scrolling GTK view with one embedded
> WebKitWebView for each message would seem like the simplest path,
> though apparently that's not (easily) possible.
>
> In any case, if Pantheon Mail has ported to WebKit2 then I think we
> should certainly look at that.`

I was thinking GSK/Clutter to be able retain something closer to the
existing look of the conversation view, but I guess that style should
be able to be retained using standard widgets without too many
problems? That certainly seems to be the approach taken by Pantheon
Mail, at least.

Will start looking into it.

//Mike

--
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>


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