Delete gtk 2.0 code?

[yetist]

8 years have passed since the first release of gtk 3.0 in 2011. I think it is time to drop support for gtk2.0. This way we can clean up the code and help to better maintain the existing code.

[karlkleinpaste]

that will depend entirely on the level of support for gtk3 in windows, namely in how well it displays. up to this point, the quality of display of gtk3 under a windows build has been nothing less than atrocious. gtk2 is perhaps ancient, but the mingw builds of it work and display very well.

[yetist]

Are you telling the truth? Is there a same display problem with gimp-2.10 and gedit-3.20 running on windows?

[karlkleinpaste]

if you're going to accuse me of lying, this discussion will be short.

i hadn't even bothered trying to build for windows using gtk3 in a couple years, because the running result looked so atrocious up to then, and there seemed to be no change toward improving it. gtk2 visuals are easily controlled using c:/Program Files/CrossWire/Xiphos/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc. gtk3 never seemed to offer something similar, that we could find when trying to get win32+gtk3 going.

feel free to give it a try yourself and see how it looks. maybe things have changed in recent mingw gtk3 builds. maybe facilities for controlling visuals in win32 w/gtk3 are up to par again. i don't know because i haven't looked in quite a while.

[yetist]

Sorry, I have no intention of accusing you of lying, just saying that what you said may not be true.
In gtk3, similar to gtkrc is gtksettings. The theme and other things can be set via settings.ini, although I don't know what you have, but I think it can be fixed.

[karlkleinpaste]

when we can buld again for windows using gtk3, and get a good-looking display, i'll be ok with removing the gtk2 code.

[domcorbex]

I'm afraid building for windows using gtk3 is not coming soon, the last comment of issue Update webkitgtk-3.0 to webkit2gtk-4.0 #3484 on msys2/MINGW-packages says:

It's unlikely that we'll manage to get this building and maintained without upstream officially supporting Windows.

[greg-hellings]

Yeah, it's monumentally frustrating. Especially since WebKit officially supports building on Windows out of the box. How difficult would it be, I wonder, to include the native WebKit widget directly into a GTK app?

[greg-hellings]

Alternatively, Chromium Embedded Framework exists and works directly out of the box with Windows. Sorry to say, but WebKit is falling by the wayside in favor of Blink/WebEngine. I'm not sure if anything but Safari and Ephiphany still use it and all of them have dropped Windows support from what I can tell.

But that's part of the upgrade treadmill that @karlkleinpaste hates. Here's a guy who demonstrates wrapping Blink into GTK apps including building for Windows with MinGW: https://github.com/cztomczak/cefcapi

[yetist]

webkitgtk-3.0 can be compiled with gtk3, it does not necessarily require gtk2, which is not the real reason why we cannot delete the gtk2 code.

[yetist]

The real problem is that no suitable webkit2gtk package is available under windows, while gtkhtml and webkitgtk-3.0 under LInux have been deprecated, only webkit2gtk is available.

And the HTML editor feature now can only work on gtkhtml and webkit-3.0, and have not been ported to webkit2gtk.

So, how to solve it is a problem.

[greg-hellings]

The problem is: Webkit API v1 is deprecated everywhere and removed in most places. Newer versions of WebKitGTK (anything later than 2.4, current is 2.18) officially don't care about Windows. GtkHTML has been a goner for a long time, as well.

If we want a single display mechanism, we

1. Have to accept that our app will forever be ancient and antiquated on Windows, sporting oodles of active CVEs and worse.
2. We need to find an alternative workaround.

• We could embed Blink directly with the Chromium Embedding Framework, which is compatible with Windows and GTK.
• We could go with official builds of WebKit for Windows, but that would mean we need to give up the Fedora cross-build ecosystem (With Github Actions and Travis CI both offering free build time on Windows machines, this isn't an impossible task. Also, the existence of vcpkg from Microsoft makes this task much less daunting, even if it doesn't include a WebKit package directly). A daunting task, but it might be less daunting than...
• The entire app could be rewritten into a display toolkit that cares about both cross-platform displays AND rich HTML displays.

[yetist]

In my opinion, xiphos needs to support both gtkhtml and webkit2gtk, and include gtkhtml as a third-party dependency fallback.

In an environment with webkit2gtk, html view uses webkit2gtk and html editor uses gtkhtml.
In an environment without webkit2gtk, html view uses gkhtml, and html editor uses gtkhtml.

Until one day, we completed the porting of html editor function to webkit2gtk, and webkit2gtk is effective on all platforms, we can delete the gtkhtml related code, and only keep the code of webkit2gtk.

[greg-hellings]

@yetist

1. You're not going to get buy in from packaging folks to embed/vendor gtkhtml. It's just not going to happen. We're going to lose packages in basically every distro out there (maybe Arch excepted?)

2. webkit2gtk is not going to support Windows. The developers don't want to support it and they're not going to support it. WebKit's GTK port exists only to give Gnome a rich HTML widget for its personal vendetta to make Epiphany or whatever its successor might be exist.

So we either need to ditch WebKitGTK entirely, or ditch Windows entirely, if we want to remain up to date. In the world of weird things, I've found this library: https://github.com/zserge/webview which is a header-only library that embeds a native widget (WebKit2GTK on Linux, MSHTML/EdgeHTML/EdgeChromium on Windows, or WebKit on Mac OS) into the window you give it. There's lots of cross-platform options out there. It's now clear the WebKitGTK is not one of them.

[yetist]

1. You're not going to get buy in from packaging folks to embed/vendor gtkhtml. It's just not going to happen. We're going to lose packages in basically every distro out there (maybe Arch excepted?)

Archlinux also does not package gtkhtml, because it has stopped maintenance. I mean add the gtkhtml code to the xiphos code tree, such as 3rd-party/gtkhtml, and compile it together at build time.