[WebODF] Switching from Qt4 to Qt5?

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi,

tl;dr Any showstopper for using Qt5 instead of Qt4 for WebODF tools?


The WebODF build system relies on qtjsruntime to run the tests.
Now qtjsruntime is currently based on Qt4, which uses a very old version of 
WebKit. There is the QtWebKit 2.3 project (see 
http://blogs.kde.org/2012/11/14/introducing-qtwebkit-23) which brings in a 
newer WebKit version, that is also used by most Linux distributions as 
standard replacement for the official QtWebKit that is part of the released Qt 
sources, even the latest 4.8.6

But the self-compiled Qt 4.8.5 on CI does not have that yet (from what I can 
tell), and people developing on Windows or OSX might also seem to need to do 
some extra work to get QtWebKit 2.3 installed, so increases the hurdles for 
them.

Problem with such an old WebKit as in normal Qt is that it is buggy and far 
behind. And we start to add hacks in WebODF code just to workaround bugs 
there, as discussed in https://github.com/kogmbh/WebODF/pull/550

So moving to Qt5, which uses a more modern version of WebKit (and/or soon 
Blink, see http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/09/12/introducing-the-qt-webengine/ ) seems like a good solution for the problems noted above.

There is currently on other subproject in WebODF based on Qt4, nativeQtClient, 
but that has bitrotted and needs some work to be resurrected. And when doing 
that it makes more sense to use Qt5 as well, because that should enable to 
reach more platforms thanks to Qt5.

So, any reason not to prepare a patch which switches qtjsruntime to Qt5 (and 
perhaps remove nativeQtClient for now)?

Everybody has Qt5 installed on their development enviroment or could do so?

Cheers
Friedrich
-- 
Friedrich W. H. Kossebau // KO GmbH
http://kogmbh.com/legal/