[Freewx-maint] Bug#738849: Please enable webview support for wx3.0

[Olly Betts]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 07:00:15AM +0100, costamagnagianfranco at yahoo.it wrote:
> Hi Olly, do you have any news on this?
> Boinc 7.4.x is going to be released soon, with webview support, would
> be nice to have it at least in experimental for testing,
> do you think is it possible?

I seem to be the only active member of the wx maintainers team, and my
wx time is already occupied with trying to migrate the archive away from
2.8.  It would be good if that happened before jessie, and there's still
a lot to do (and this is only the C++ packages - I've not even started
on wxpython yet):

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/WxWidgets/Transition2.8to3.0

So if you want to get webview support with any degree of urgency, you'll
have to do the hard work yourself I'm afraid - just chucking the trivial
patch at me isn't anything like enough.  If someone provides a well
tested and sane patch, I'm very likely to apply it.

As I've outlined already at
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=738849#22 we can't
have libwxgtk3.0-0 depending on webkit or else people will quite
reasonably complain about the dependency bloat.  The webkit libraries
either need to be loaded dynamically on demand, or else we need a
separate binary package containing just the webkit parts of wx (similar
to libwxgtk-media3.0-0 for wxMediaCtrl).

To be explicit:

For webview support, the first thing you probably need to do is check
the binary packages you built from your modified source package and see
what their dependencies are compared to those for the packages currently
in the archive.

If your changes gain us a dependency on webkit libraries (which seems
likely) you need to either split off that code into a separate library
and put it in its own binary package, or change wx to load those
libraries only when actually used, ideally using the wx wrappers around
dlopen(), dlsym(), etc so we can try to push the patch upstream.

If you want us to switch to using libnotify instead of the generic wx
implementation, you need to respond to my query (and quoted source code
comment) in comment 22.

If you want us to enable sdl and libmspack support, you also need to
justify why doing so is useful, and investigate the (direct and
indirect) extra dependencies which each results in.

Cheers,
    Olly