[Development] Qt WebKit dependency in Qt Assistant

[André Pönitz]

On Wed, Jan 06, 2016 at 07:14:41PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 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.

Wrong conclusion.

The fact that QTextBrowser hasn't changed does not mean the help display
is the same as before.

Maybe the set of CSS features the help style uses changed?

Oh wait. It has. Even a couple of time since "long ago".

Last time on 2015-10-16, with the commit message mentioning "including
simplified CSS rules suitable for rendering with a QTextBrowser".

> 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.)

See above.

Andre'