Hi all,

As some of you may already know, there is an ongoing effort to revive QtWebKit 
by updating its WebKit engine to the current state of upstream at webkit.org 
[1]. 

While it still haven't reached feature parity with QtWebkit module hosted by Qt 
Project, its Widgets API is already in a good shape [2]. It also brings many 
new features, including support for large part of ES2015. It is binary 
compatible with QtWebKit 5.6 and can be used as drop-in replacement.

In this regard I have following questions to the Qt community:

1. Would you like to see this project as a part of Qt Project?

QtWebKit used to be a part of Qt Essentials (at least before its removal in 5.6 
release, I'm not sure what status does it have right now). I think it's neither 
feasible nor reasonable to restore this status it as a part of Qt Essentials, 
as it used to be before 5.6. We have a massive amount of 3rd party code so it 
would require much more work to support complete range of platforms and 
compilers, supported by Qt. In particular, full C++ 11 support is required from 
compiler, making minimal required GCC version as high as 4.8. (In the 
meanwhile, WebKit already started adoption of C++1y in trunk, though GCC 4.9 is 
still supported)

Also it's likely that supported platforms won't have perfect feature parity, 
and it's not clear if we are going to support WebKit 2 on Windows at all (if 
somebody reading this is interested, please join us!)

2. Is it OK to use "QtWebKit" name for this project, and if yes, how should it 
be versioned?

Pros:
* It is a drop-in replacement for QtWebKit, so it would simplify its downstream 
adoption, e.g. Linux distros could replace old insecure QtWebKit 5.6 with this 
new offering.
* QtWebKit is a name of Qt port of WebKit. This project is basically a rebase 
of Qt port code to the newer revision of trunk, so I don't see it as a fork of 
original project, but mere update.

Cons:
* Old QtWebKit will probably continue to exist, because range of supported 
platforms for new QtWebKit is more limited. Right now we have no plans to 
support Android, QNX or WinCE, it's also unclear if we will ever support WebKit 
2 on Windows. That means we need a way to make a clear difference between 
branches of the project.
* Users may mistakenly report problems specific to the new version to Qt JIRA. 
This issue could be worked around if Qt Project kindly allowed us to have a 
project in Qt JIRA (maybe even resurrect old QTWEBKIT product), so I could 
simply move such reports to another project and reassign. OTOH, it's quite 
possible that bugs reported against new QtWebKit affect 5.6 as well, for 
example see QTBUG-53532.

Of course, if anybody here is interested, any kind of help will be greatly 
appreciated.

Thanks in advance!


[1] https://github.com/annulen/webkit/wiki
[2] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-qt/2016-May/004062.html
Latest development is in "qtwebkit-stable" branch, we are planning to release 
TP2 with many fixes and improvements really soon

-- 
Regards,
Konstantin
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