[xiphos-devel] webkitgtk, gtkhtml, and GTK2 dependencies

[Scott Buchanan]

Hello all,

My initial goal when contributing to Xiphos was to fix the failing CI 
builds Karl talked about in February, sadly though this has led back to 
what seems to be the single problem holding back a potential release.

Upgrading away from webkitgtk is critical since webkitgtk has been removed 
from all major Linux distros' repositories. The reason that can't happen 
seems to be a lack of Windows builds for webkit2gtk, it's successor 
library. As Greg said in this GitHub issue comment ( https://github.com/
crosswire/xiphos/issues/963#issuecomment-618181840[1] ):


> we either need to ditch WebKitGTK entirely, or ditch Windows entirely, if 
we want to remain up to date

and indeed if we want to remain packaged on major distros.

Even setting aside the monumental task of actual implementing whatever 
change is needed, first a consensus needs to be reached which approach we 
take. In my opinion, the best option would be to use a stripped down, not 
even necessarily HTML-based, renderer in place of both webkitgtk and 
gtkhtml which is cross platform and well supported. Feel free to challenge 
me if that seems like a bad idea.

I'm not aware of the full functionality required by Xiphos regarding a 
suitable rendering engine but certainly moving away from webkitgtk is 
something that we need to look into if we want to get a new release out.

God bless,
Scott.

--------
[1] https://github.com/crosswire/xiphos/issues/963#issuecomment-618181840
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