WebKit (almost) in unstable

I finally uploaded the first release of WebKit to unstable. It will obviously need to go through NEW first, which might take some time.

There still is work to do, first of which being to correctly setup the git repositories. For the moment, there is only a git repository following upstream svn available on git.d.o. The branches are a bit messy, though ; I have to figure out why git-svn insists on randomly recreating the master branch... I supposedly removed the master branch to have the svn branch follow the git-svn remote.

Anyways, once it is sorted out, I'll set up a special branch to create our tarballs and from which we'd derive the debian branch (or not, this is not decided yet). This special branch will be a copy of the upstream branch with some stuff removed (see debian/copyright in the current packages source for a list of these).

Speaking of the package source, since NEW is not available, I made the packages sources and binaries available on gluck.

An important note: the version I uploaded is made from revision 24735 of upstream svn repository, which is from July 27. Unfortunately, to be able to build the first version of epiphany that includes webkit embedding (2.19.6) as is, webkit_gtk_page_can_go_forward and webkit_gtk_page_can_go_backward are needed, and these, while available in the API headers, only appeared in the source code on July 30.

However, I built a hacked epiphany with calls to these functions removed (which means back and forward buttons won't work properly), and made it available on gluck too. Be aware this version requires glib and gtk from experimental, which, I've been said, made all gtk/glib warnings fatal. That means all applications that usually fill your .xsession-errors log file are likely to crash with these versions.

You'll note integration is not yet perfect, biggest misfeature being the scrollbars missing, and some glitches such as the user agent (it is hardcoded in WebKit :-/), and the about window still saying it is based on Gecko ;)

I'll try to push a new version of WebKit soon enough.

Stay tuned.

2007-08-15 17:40:38+0900

webkit

Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “WebKit (almost) in unstable”

  1. Bleeding edge » Blog Archive » Webkit? Says:

    […] I must admit I had no idea that something called webkit exists. Until a few days ago, that Lars blogged about adding support for it to liferea. And now it seems we’re about to have webkit available in unstable. […]

  2. Kai Hendry Says:

    How does this Webkit distro differ from Konquerer’s?

    Could you share the same packages I wonder? And just have different front ends?

    I am trying to understand what you are doing. Why are you basing Epiphany on Webkit instead of Gecko? Or are you doing both?

    Please elaborate. Keep it up, very interesting stuff! :)

  3. Loïc Minier Says:

    experimental’s gtk/glib don’t make the warnings fatal, but experimental’s gnome-session does; you can disable this feature by unsetting G_DEBUG in the env.

    That said, experimental’s gtk/glib break a lot of things. :)

  4. glandium Says:

    Kai: Konqueror still uses KHTML, but is due to use WebKit at some time of the future. Now, the not so nice thing that I read a few weeks ago, after I started working on the WebKit package, is that Trolltech wants to incorporate WebKit into Qt… so we’ll probably end up with code duplication. The sad thing is Qt’s WebKit will surely *not* include the Gdk “port”, so there will still be no choice for WebKitGdk… I hope it will be possible to build this version of Qt against our WebKit Qt package.

    The epiphany package I hacked only uses the WebKit backend, because it was just easier to do so. I’d recommend the maintainers to create an epiphany-browser-webkit additional package to the current ones, instead.

  5. Kai Hendry Says:

    I’ve assumed Webkit is ‘toolkit ambiguous’.

    Webkit is also on Apple (Cocoa?) and the S60 platform (not sure what toolkit they use).

    Hence I assumed Webkit is designed in such a way to slap on any sort of front end.

    Though you know best. :) Be great to have a native build of Webkit on my machine for testing!