[Interest] QWE hacking: "backporting" src/3rdparty/chromium?

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

Out of curiosity, how feasible would it be to deploy a more up-to-date QtWebEngine on a system that's stuck on an older Qt version. I understood from a previous exchange that QWE is much more a "thin wrapper" around the actual web engine than QtWebKit is, with the intention of making it easier to upgrade that component. If so, it might be possible to replace the src/3rdparty/chromium directory from, say, 5.8.0 with the one from 5.9.7 and get things to build with only minimal patching.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
R.

[Kai Koehne]

-----Original Message-----
Of René J.V. Bertin
Sent: Wednesday, November 7, 2018 3:10 PM
Subject: [Interest] QWE hacking: "backporting" src/3rdparty/chromium?
Hi,
Out of curiosity, how feasible would it be to deploy a more up-to-date
QtWebEngine on a system that's stuck on an older Qt version. I understood
from a previous exchange that QWE is much more a "thin wrapper" around the
actual web engine than QtWebKit is, with the intention of making it easier to
upgrade that component. If so, it might be possible to replace the
src/3rdparty/chromium directory from, say, 5.8.0 with the one from 5.9.7 and
get things to build with only minimal patching.
Thoughts?

That won't fly, because Chromium API is unstable and changes very often.

What we're trying to support though is building a newer qtwebengine.git against older Qt versions (usually last LTS).

For your example with Qt 5.8 I'm not sure, because there were some configuration system changes that probably require some fixes.

But you can build qtwebengine 5.11 branch against Qt 5.9.

Kai

[René J.V. Bertin]

Post by Kai Koehne
What we're trying to support though is building a newer qtwebengine.git against older Qt versions (usually last LTS).
For your example with Qt 5.8 I'm not sure, because there were some configuration system changes that probably require some fixes.
But you can build qtwebengine 5.11 branch against Qt 5.9.

Ah, that's also good to know, thanks. Does that also mean QWE 5.11 builds on all platforms where Qt 5.9 builds (I'm thinking of Mac OS versions in particular)?

Won't help me though because the fact I'm running Qt 5.9 on the system in question is already a hack (OS X 10.9.5; for reasons I won't go into here I want to postpone upgrading the OS as long as possible). Getting Qt(Base) 5.9 to build there was relatively easy (and not too much work to figure out). I started trying to backport QWE 5.9 the same way but gave up when it became clear this would take a *lot* more time. That's why I'm using QWE 5.8; it builds against Qt 5.9 with no or minimal adaptation.

R

[Kai Koehne]

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, November 7, 2018 4:14 PM
Subject: Re: [Interest] QWE hacking: "backporting" src/3rdparty/chromium?

Post by Kai Koehne
What we're trying to support though is building a newer qtwebengine.git

against older Qt versions (usually last LTS).

Post by Kai Koehne
For your example with Qt 5.8 I'm not sure, because there were some

configuration system changes that probably require some fixes.

Post by Kai Koehne
But you can build qtwebengine 5.11 branch against Qt 5.9.

Ah, that's also good to know, thanks. Does that also mean QWE 5.11 builds on
all platforms where Qt 5.9 builds (I'm thinking of Mac OS versions in
particular)?

Well, Qt 5.11 dropped support for macOS 10.11. So indeed you might
run into issues there ☹

Kai

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

Post by René J.V. Bertin
Hi,
Out of curiosity, how feasible would it be to deploy a more up-to-date
QtWebEngine on a system that's stuck on an older Qt version. I understood
from a previous exchange that QWE is much more a "thin wrapper" around the
actual web engine than QtWebKit is, with the intention of making it easier
to upgrade that component. If so, it might be possible to replace the
src/3rdparty/chromium directory from, say, 5.8.0 with the one from 5.9.7
and get things to build with only minimal patching.

You should be able to compile QtWebEngine 5.9.7 against Qt 5.8. We dont test
that, but we do test QWE 5.9 against Qt 5.6, so it has a good chance of
working.

Note however that newer QtWebEngine comes with the same platform limitations
regardless of what Qt they are built against as QWE always have harder
limitation due to limits in what upstream Chromium supports building on

'Allan

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Thursday November 08 2018 16:32:17 Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:

Thanks Allan, but you were a tad late to the party ;)

Post by Allan Sandfeld Jensen
Note however that newer QtWebEngine comes with the same platform limitations
regardless of what Qt they are built against as QWE always have harder
limitation due to limits in what upstream Chromium supports building on

I've noticed. In my case I'm not sure though if it's due to Chromium or simply due to Qt. AFAIK the latter has supported OS X 10.9 longer (until 65.0.3325.181, March 2018) than Qt. Apple being Apple that doesn't mean that it'd build of course...

R.