[Development] Qt WebKit dependency in Qt Assistant

[Aleix Pol]

On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 8:01 PM, Koehne Kai <Kai.Koehne at theqtcompany.com> wrote:
>> -----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.

Hi,
That's the answer I was looking forward to. Thanks Kai and the team. :)

Regards,
Aleix