Qtwebengine

[Scott Kitterman]

On Sunday, May 15, 2016 10:10:11 PM Valorie Zimmerman wrote:
> Reading backlog on channels today, I saw this in #plasma:
> 
> [02:12] <mgraesslin> hmm looks like kmail with qtwebengine is faster
> in opening mails, that would be positive
> [02:12] <notmart> yay
> [02:12] <notmart> but distribution will ever package it now?
> [02:13] --> soee (~soee at bhr157.neoplus.adsl.tpnet.pl) has joined this
> channel. [02:13] <bshah> qtwebengine?
> [02:15] <notmart> yeah, qtwebengine and in turn anything using it
> [02:15] <mgraesslin> well kdepim now depends on it
> [02:15] <notmart> like, we haz a "beautiful" mobile web browser
> written one year and an half ago... :p
> [02:16] <mgraesslin> so distros need to either package it or drop kdepim
> [02:18] <notmart> yep
> [02:18] <bshah> arch packages it
> [02:19] <bshah> but well debian and friends.. meh
> [02:19] <mgraesslin> the deb-based distros don't
> 
> I'm assuming that Debian doesn't package it because of policy -
> chromium inside of qtwebengine evidently embeds its own dependencies,
> which is ... ick.
> 
> I looked it up on the Qt website:
> http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebengine-index.html
> 
> If KDEPim will now depend on it, we have no choice, I think? Shall I
> file a packaging bug against it?

It's not just policy (Debian policy doesn't forbid embedded libraries, it just 
discourages them).  The estimate I recall reading from people on the Debian 
Qt-KDE team is that packaging QtWebEngine is about the same amout of work as 
Chromium or Firefox on their own.

Take a look at the number of people that work on those (including people doing 
it as a full time job) and ask yourself how feasible it is.

Scott K