[Development] Deprecating modules with 5.5

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Thursday 05 February 2015, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote:
> I'll try to summarize my POV on this issue in this mail:
> 
> - I agree with Lars that HTML5 is a huge pig ;)
> 
> - Bundling so many stuff in that package is definitely a non go for Debian.
> 
> - I do also understand they require a competitive product. But on the same
> line I do also think the level of pragmatism needed for shipping
> QtWebEngine *as it currently is* is simply too much for Debian.
> 
> - Having yet another copy of chromium in the archive really doesn't sounds
> great, as far as I understand we don't even give security support in Debian
> stable :-/ [0]
> 
> - Unbundling all that stuff and making it work with system stuff **might**
> be doable, but I *personally* won't put my time on this. I have
> communicated this decision to my fellow comaintainers and so far no one
> has stood up for the challenge. So chances are that we aren't going to
> ship it (and this might mean the same for Ubuntu). Yes, things might
> break, but with no man power there is really nothing to do.
> 
> - I won't stop anybody trying to unbundle all the required stuff and trying
> to get it to work with system libs, I will simply not put my time on that.
> 
> - Using V8 means we need to drop support for arm64 (aka AArch64), powerpc,
> powerpc64 and s390x. I understand this *might* be a minor side effect for
> the Qt project, but still important for us.
> 
> 
> [0] <https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3148>
> 
It would have been the same problem with WebKit. Neither Google nor Apple 
cares about supporting any build environment more than 1-2 years old. When we 
still was part of WebKit, Digia were the ones supporting the at the time most 
widely used OS X release 10.6 because Apple did not, and that on top of 
support all Windows versions which Apple doesn't care about those either.

And as you might remember PowerPC turned out to have been broken in QtWebKit's 
JavaScriptCore 5.0 to 5.3, and no one noticed, and those changes are not even 
upstreamable because Apple doesn't care.

That said. I would prefer to deprecate QtWebKitWidgets in a later release, but 
the actual difference would be minimal, we are not going to invest any more or 
any less resources depending on what we call it.

`Allan