Re: [Geary] port to WebKit 2?

[Adam Dingle <adam medovina org>]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 9:32 PM, Michael Gratton <mike vee net> wrote:

Hey Adam, On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 2:45 AM, Adam Dingle <adam medovina org> wrote:

Mike, I'm glad we have a Geary maintainer once again! :) Like you, I also have WebKit 2.4.10. Unfortunately even with your recent fix for (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=763933) I'm still seeing frequent Geary crashes: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=764152

I did see that one, and the crash when pasting (Bug 764168) - thanks for CC'ing me. It all seems to be related, and annoying that we can't even work around the paste bug because it's not a call in Geary that's causing it. I don't know how interested the WebKitGTK+ people are in fixing the regression though, understandably since 2.4 is supposed to be unsupported.

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.

adam