[Development] Deprecating modules with 5.5

[Knoll Lars]

On 03/02/15 20:25, "André Pönitz" <apoenitz at t-online.de> wrote:

>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.

Yes, making the Qt WebView module work on all desktop platforms could be a
possible solution.

Cheers,
Lars