Subject: bug#53197: wpewebkit: Fails to build (a required package was not found)

From: Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2022 08:45:11 +0100

Am Mittwoch, dem 12.01.2022 um 13:28 -0500 schrieb Leo Famulari:
> On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 08:28:13AM +0100, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:
> > wpewebkit seems to have been ignored in the core-updates merge.  It
> > still uses old-style inputs and (more importantly) libsoup now refers
> > to libsoup 3.0 which is incompatible with most packages that depend
> > on the old version.  libsoup-minimal-2 should be used in its place.
> 
> This is kind of off-topic for your message, but I pay attention to
> webkitgtk because it's security-critical for the Epiphany "gnome-web"
> browser and GNOME overall, but I never looked at wpewebkit.
> 
> It doesn't have any dependents in Guix. It was commented-out in the
> inputs of gst-plugins-bad, but there was no contextual explanation in
> the surrounding code or commit message, so I removed the comment.
WPEWebkit along with some hitherto unpackaged... package[1] would be
used to enable a source[2] that rendered a Web page inside GStreamer. 
Wild stuff.

> The latest wpewebkit release is 2.34.3, according to this page:
> 
> https://wpewebkit.org/code/
> 
> It seems to be share a release pattern with webkitgtk:
> 
> https://webkitgtk.org/
They share a release schedule, because both of them are ports of the
same rendering engine (Webkit), but they are adjusted towards different
contexts (GTK and embedded respectively), so their inputs and I expect
also parts of their build systems differ.

> I suggest we try to keep this package up to date or remove it from
> Guix.
I agree, but note that the above shows how we can't expect wpewebkit to
build fine when webkitgtk does.  For the record, I'd prefer keeping it
updated, even if there's no users currently.  Eventually, Guix will
overtake the embedded browsing market :)

[1] https://github.com/Igalia/WPEBackend-fdo
[2] https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/wpe/wpesrc.html