[Freewx-maint] Bug#790222: [boinc_dev] Bug#790222: wxwidgets3.0: depends on libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 which is deprecated

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

On Thu, 6 Jul 2017 04:22:55 +0100 Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 05, 2017 at 05:53:14PM +0200, Christian Beer wrote:
> > I'm not sure I fully understand the issue. So I'll try to explain what I
> > understood.
> > 
> > Debian is going to remove the package "libwebkitgtk-1.0-0" in testing
> > (buster) which will also remove the package "libwxgtk-webview3.0-0v5"
> > which is a dependency for package "boinc-manager" which means
> > "boinc-manager" will have a broken dependency.
> > 
> > One possible fix is to rebuild the package "libwxgtk-webview3.0-0v5"
> > using GTK3 which means all wxWidgets packages need to be rebuilt too.
> > Since "boinc-manager" is the only package using
> > "libwxgtk-webview3.0-0v5" you want to rather drop webview support on
> > Debian than rebuilding wxWidgets.
> 
> That's rather misinterpreting the situation.
> 
> We can't sanely release libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 with buster, because its
> not been maintained for ages, and that's highly problematic for a
> browser stack.  But the buster release is likely be 1.5-2 years from
> now so we have time to address this.
> 
> To switch to a maintained version of webkitgtk we need to migrate to
> using wxWidgets built with GTK3.  The "rebuild" part is easy, but
> switching to GTK3 is known to cause incompatibilities with some programs
> using wxWidgets, or at least it's known it did - the problems may have
> been fixed by newer versions of wxWidgets and/or those programs.  But
> we can't know without a lot of testing.

In case it wasn't clear: note that moving to GTK3 and building against
libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev is not enough, as libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev is also a part of
src:webkitgtk, and we plan to remove it as it's also affected by all the
security bugs.

Moving to GTK+3 and libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev can be a first step, with the goal of
later moving to libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev, i.e. src:webkit2gtk.

Note that dropping libwxgtk-webview3.0-0v5 is just a better option than to ship
webkitgtk in another release. Obviously the best option is to port wxwidgets or
to make boinc-manager not use webview so it doesn't have to be removed. Which
path we follow is up to you.

HTH,

Cheers,
Emilio