Realistically speaking, the job of replacing WebKit with WebEngine everywhere it is used is impossible. It would take man years of effort with no reward -- other than causing regressions for end users and bug reports for maintainers. WebEngine is only a direct replacement for WebKit in the most superficial of use cases.
As for the use of WebKit in calibre, in the short-to-medium term it will remain as is, and I will probably have to end up maintaining Qt WebKit for myself. I will make this work public, as I did for the Visual Studio 2015 compatible fork of python that I maintain. So other users of Qt WebKit can benefit from it and hopefully help with maintaining it. In the longer term I plan to gradually phase out use of Qt WebKit in calibre. However, this is likely to be a very long drawn out affair. Some things can be replaced by WebEngine *relatively* painlessly, such as the use of WebKit in the viewer and editor. Others, such as the use of WebKit for a headless, JS enabled automated browser in the calibre recipe system and for the rendering of HTML to PDF will be much harder, requiring the aforementioned man-years of effort. I have no idea how Linux distributions are going to tackle this mess. I am just glad I dont maintain any. Kovid. On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 08:12:02AM +0100, Florian Bruhin wrote: > Hey, > > (Cc'ing Kovid/Detlev because I think they'll be impacted by this > as well as the upstreams of Eric/Calibre, Cc'ing Axel Beckert because > I'm working with him for the package mentioned later in this mail) > > I'd like to discuss the future of Qt5's QtWebKit (and PyQt's bindings > for it) in Debian. Looking at the Qt 5.6 beta, it seems like Qt > upstream will definitely remove QtWebKit - not only from the binary > releases, but from source releases as well. > > As it's likely many packages will still need a Qt5 QtWebKit, and based > on [1] ("Qt5's WebKit is expected to stay supported until Qt6") it > looks like Debian will still continue to support it, if necessary > building from upstream's git[2]? > > As for the PyQt5 wrappers for QtWebKit, upstream says[3]: > > > AIUI, they are still providing source releases. You're going to > > continue to support that, right? > > Yes, if they are part of the official release. If not then I won't > do anything to break things, but they won't be officially > supported. > > I'm planning to open an ITP for my project[4] using PyQt and > (currently) QtWebKit soon, and I'm guessing for at least Eric[5] and > Calibre[6] this is a problem as well. > > Will Debian also support PyQt's QtWebKit until Qt 6 if possible? > If not, what will happen with the packages which depend on it? > > Thanks, > > Florian > > [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Qt4WebKitRemoval > [2] http://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtwebkit.git/ > [3] https://www.riverbankcomputing.com/pipermail/pyqt/2016-January/036841.html > [4] http://www.qutebrowser.org/ > [5] https://packages.debian.org/stretch/eric > [6] https://packages.debian.org/stretch/calibre > > -- > http://www.the-compiler.org | m...@the-compiler.org (Mail/XMPP) > GPG: 916E B0C8 FD55 A072 | http://the-compiler.org/pubkey.asc > I love long mails! | http://email.is-not-s.ms/ -- _____________________________________ Dr. Kovid Goyal http://www.kovidgoyal.net http://calibre-ebook.com _____________________________________ -- http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-kde-talk