[webkit-qt] Qt 4 port of WebKit (was Re: kde-qt-webkit)

[Girish Ramakrishnan]

Hi,

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 5:53 AM, Simon Hausmann <simon.hausmann at nokia.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 25, 2012 02:09:27 AM ext Andrea Diamantini wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> I'm here to announce the will to work on an unofficial branch of
>> qtwebkit, living on gitorious as
>> https://gitorious.org/~adjam/webkit/kde-qt-webkit.
>>
>> Given qtwebkit devs intention to no more develop the WebKit1 bits of the
>> qt port and considering the needs of kde webkit browsers (you may know
>> I'm just developing one), I decided to try working a bit on it with some
>> minimal targets.
>> In my idea, kde-qt-webkit releases should be drop-in replacement for the
>> qtwebkit lib provided with qt 4.x, so that we can i.e. compile kdewebkit
>> against this new library without problems. In fact, no real kde
>> integration will be provided (that is, kio and k- classes will continue
>> living outside webkit code). At least for the qt4/kde4 release cycle.
>>
>> Targets for this port are:
>>
>> - let the branch synced with svn webkit master.
>>
>> - merge Lindsay Mathieson work about spellcheck support
>>
>> - let html5 audio/video work as best as possible, eventually switching
>> back to the phonon implementation (and that's because I cc'ed in this
>> mail Harald Sitter, actual phonon maintainer)
>>
>> - (eventually) let (kde-)-qt-webkit compile with cmake
>>
>> - fix some of the kdewebkit integration known issues pending like (and
>> here is adawit cc):
>>
>> * [QtWebKit] Form completion like the one available in native Qt widgets
>> such
>>    as QLineEdit is missing due to lack of access to form elements.
>>    See http://webkit.org/b/36668.
>>
>> and so on
>>
>> - do some bugfixing and gain some webkit development experience.
>>
>> - backport at least one fix :)
>>
>>
>> The idea is just to work on this until kde5 (whose release data is
>> probably comparable with that of qt 5.1) and then decide again what to
>> do (basically dropping out WebKit1 support and moving to qt5/webkit2 or
>> continue this experience becoming a "more official" full kde webkit port.
>>
>> Hints and comments are welcome.
>
> I think this is a good move. I suggest to take this even further and think of
> it as the continuation of the Qt 4 port of WebKit that _follows_ trunk but is
> maintained outside of trunk.
>
> Are you open to the idea of making it a little bit more generic? I'm
> reasonably optimistic that other parties might be interesting in joining.
> (I wouldn't worry about things like Symbian support, btw)
>
> If this succeeds, then the Qt 4 port can live on a while longer and you guys
> can gain some experience hacking on WebKit.
>
> In the meantime we can reduce the maintenance on trunk.
>

I also like the idea of having QtWebKit 1 based on Qt4 outside trunk.
Many companies still rely on Qt4/QtWebKit and would like to see a 2.3
release. It would be greatly helpful, if you guys can make releases
non-KDE specific.

Also, do I understand correctly that QtWebKit1 on Qt5 will still be
supported in trunk for the lifetime of Qt5? Is anyone actively
maintaining it (by which I mean adding new API, new developments etc)
? If not, I will be happy to pick this up. I have a few things on my
plate right now, so not immediately, but give me a month's time.

Thanks,
Girish