[Development] Qt WebKit dependency in Qt Assistant

[Koehne Kai]

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Development [mailto:development-bounces at qt-project.org] Im
> Auftrag von Kevin Kofler
> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 6. Januar 2016 19:15
> An: development at qt-project.org
> Betreff: Re: [Development] Qt WebKit dependency in Qt Assistant
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Aleix Pol wrote:
> > One of the big news lately is the deprecation of Qt WebKit module.
> >
> > One of the Qt dependencies on it is assistant (which is a tool I use
> > quite often, really) and AFAIK it's using it quite thoroughly. It used
> > to be powered by QTextBrowser though, as far as I remember.
> 
> We tried building Qt Assistant against QTextBrowser in Fedora long ago (IIRC,
> in an attempt to get rid of the circular dependency between Qt 4 and
> QtWebKit 4). We found that it was a very bad idea because the Qt help was
> looking horrible as a result, not to mention third-party help using Assistant.
> So this was very quickly reverted to QtWebKit. AFAIK, QTextBrowser's HTML
> and especially CSS support has not improved significantly, if at all, since then.

That's the plan for the Qt SDK in 5.6 though: The doc team simplified the CSS somewhat so that QTextBrowser can handle it. While the rendered page is arguably not as polished as with a 'proper' HTML renderer, it's IMO good enough.

There has also been patches for using QtWebEngine as a backend, but this does not cover all platforms that we currently provide binaries for (e.g.  MinGW would be left out).

> This is really not funny:
> * you (= the Qt project) stop maintaining QtWebKit,
> * you deprecate it,
> * you stop providing even security updates for it,
> * and now you stop even shipping it at all, and yet you haven't even ported
> YOUR OWN code away from it! (And the QTextBrowser "solution" leaves A
> LOT to be desired.)

We'll provide source packages for qtwebkit as long as it's feasible.

Regards

Kai