Re: WebKit-GTK dependency in some GNOME applications: why not Gjs?

[Andrea Giammarchi <andrea giammarchi gmail com>]

I'm not sure I understand your concern (I'm a JS chap) but GJS is basically SpiderMonkey 24 ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/SpiderMonkey/Introduction_to_the_JavaScript_shell ) with its own kind of module system which points directly to some internal binding based on GObject Introspection (https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Projects/GObjectIntrospection?action="">) which makes GJS simple enough to script with, interacting with other modules, *including* if imported WebKitGTK (or even better WebKit2GTK).

I don't think you can substitute WebKitGTK with GJS, also because WebkitGTK is used by PyGTK and any other language based on  GObject bindings.

I'm pretty sure I haven't answered your question, but maybe I've made some clarification accordingly my (early) understanding.

Best Regards

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 10:23 AM, Émeric MASCHINO <emeric maschino gmail com> wrote:

[Please CC me, I'm not (yet?) subscribed to this list]

Hi,

If I understand correctly, Gjs or Seed provide JS implementation for
the GNOME project [1]. It seems that Seed is dead [2] and that many
GNOME components have adopted Gjs, including GNOME 3's most central
one: GNOME Shell.

I'm not familiar enough with the GNOME project, nor JS development
(I'm a C++ guy), so I'm probably missing the point, but how is it that
some GNOME applications have dependencies neither on Gjs, nor Seed,
but directly on WebKit-GTK? Namely, Sushi, Yelp, Evolution, Shotwell,
Empathy, GNOME-Online-Accounts (G-O-A) and Epiphany directly require
WebKit-GTK and GNOME-Contacts and Evolution-Data-Server indirectly
require WebKit-GTK if G-O-A is enabled [3].

I'm asking this because, although WebKit-GTK never worked on the ia64
arch (whereas Spidermonky do), WebKit-GTK >= 2.8 simply can't be built
on ia64 nowadays. This is blocking for GNOME >= 3.16 because of the
above-listed GNOME applications that now require an WebKit-GTK >= 2.8.
However, even if WebKit-GTK >= 2.8 could be built successfully on
ia64, GNOME applications based on WebKit-GTK would badly crash in the
end. I've summarized the situation in this Gentoo's BR [3], Gentoo
being the last (to my knowledge) Linux distribution supporting ia64.

So, questions are: is the WebKit-GTK dependency in some GNOME
applications expected? Why not depend on Gjs, as it seems that Gjs is
GNOME's default JS implementation?

Thanks,

     Émeric


[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/_javascript_
[2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/_javascript_-list/2015-March/msg00002.html
[3] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555504
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