Re: Webkitgtk maintenance

Re: Webkitgtk maintenance

[Yaakov Selkowitz]

Please see: https://cygwin.com/problems.html#personal-email

This applies doubly so to former maintainers.  Redirecting to cygwin-
apps.

On Tue, 2023-09-12 at 17:11 +0200, Blandin Jean-Marie wrote:
> Dear Mr Selkowitz,
> 
> First of all, I want to apologize for the time I take from you by
> writing
> this email.
> It's about the cygwin package I put as object of this email which has
> been
> orphaned for many years.
> The fact is other packages depend on it : I'm used to programming in
> gambas3 language and as the cygwin maintainer of this package told
> me, he
> cannot update his part as long as the webkitgtk package is not
> recent.
> For sure I can imagine the large amount of time it takes to maintain
> a
> cygwin package but it is the only way AFAIK to use Linux apps on
> windows
> without admin rights.
> You seemed to step back from webkitgtk maintenance a few years ago
> and I
> would be very glad if you could tell a name to follow on because of
> the
> importance for the gambas3 community on windows.

I did not find any such discussion on the lists, so I don't know
exactly what was said.  Therefore, I'll give you as much background as
I can.

Even while I was still maintaining webkitgtk, I was stuck with what
became even then a very old version.  The reason for this is the
upstream migration to WebKit2:

https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

In order to support the then-new split-process model (which we now all
take for granted in browsers and browser engines), there needs to be
some form of IPC between the UI process and web process.  In WebKit2 on
*NIX this was done in a way that involved passing file descriptors over
a unix socket, which Cygwin never supported.  As such, once webkitgtk
completed its migration to WebKit2, I was unable to further update the
package.

(For a similar reason, it became impossible for anyone to update mingw-
webkitgtk in any distro because a Windows counterpart implementation to
that IPC was either never developed or just not integrated into
webkitgtk.  With Apple abandoning Safari on Windows, and Qt migrating
from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine (which is based on Chromium), there
doesn't seem to be any commercial interest in maintaining WebKit2 for
Windows.)

Therefore, this issue is currently CANTFIX until Cygwin gains support
for passing file descriptors over unix sockets (in a Linux-compatible
way), at which point a new maintainer could theoretically then try to
port a current webkitgtk version to Cygwin.  I sincerely wish luck to
whomever tries to tackle this, as it will likely be no small feat.

HTH,

-- 
Yaakov