[Development] Deprecating modules with 5.5

[André Pönitz]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2015 at 07:47:14AM +0000, Ziller Eike wrote:
> 
> > On Feb 3, 2015, at 8:33 AM, Knoll Lars <Lars.Knoll at theqtcompany.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I’d like to mark a few modules as deprecated with 5.5, and most likely
> > remove them from the binary packages with 5.6. These modules are:
> > 
> > * Qt WebKit
> 
> As long as WebEngine is not (yet?) a “full" replacement of Qt WebKit
> functionality, most notably https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-44221 we
> should still include Qt WebKit in our binary packages.  Assistant and Qt
> Creator will otherwise only have a QTextBrowser backend for displaying help,
> leading to broken looking documentation, since that does not even roughly
> support the CSS that we use in Qt documentation.

I think the main dependency here is that Qt Creator needs to render Qt
documentation. What technology this uses is of secondary interest. It
just needs to be "good enough", and it preferably should not be a lot bigger
than actually needed for the task.

WebKit was already a bit of a stretch here, I do not really see WebEngine as
an improvement in the size and overhead departement. It's a huge club for a
task that's just a wee bit beyond the QTextBrowser fallback's capabilities
(which was, btw, working reasonably well for a while about two or three
years ago, until some change in the doc style sheet made it really ugly
again).

Creator would benefit most from a *lightweight* HTML renderer, possibly
thin wrappers around platforms' native renderers, _or_ a doc style that's
usable in QTextBrowser, less so from being used as a pawn in the WebKit vs
WebEngine discussion, both of which are not really good fits for the task.

Andre'