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

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi;

all the applications you listed depend on WebKitGTK because they use
web views, not because they need a JavaScript engine. For instance,
Yelp uses WebKit to render HTML help pages; GNOME Online Account uses
a web view to allow authentication to web services; Evolution uses
WebKit to display HTML emails; etc.

If you have issues with WebKit on IA-64 then I strongly suggest you
help out the WebKitGTK developers; you can start from the website[1],
or join the #webkitgtk+ IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

[1]: http://webkitgtk.org/

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

On 23 September 2015 at 10:23, 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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