Re: [ANNOUNCE] Emacs 26.1 released

[joakim@verona.se]

Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com> writes:

> Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us> writes:
>
>> On Mon, 28 May 2018, Nicolas Petton wrote:
>>
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> Version 26.1 of the Emacs text editor is now available.
>>
>> I tried configuring this new Emacs like
>>
>> ./configure '--with-xwidgets'
>>
>> on a somewhat old (but still supported) Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release but
>> encounter this error:
>>
>> configure:12632: checking for WEBKIT
>> configure:12639: $PKG_CONFIG --exists --print-errors "$WEBKIT_MODULES"
>> Package webkit2gtk-4.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
>> Perhaps you should add the directory containing `webkit2gtk-4.0.pc'
>> to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
>> No package 'webkit2gtk-4.0' found
>>
>> There was no mention in the release notes that versions still in heavy
>> use were being abandoned and that Emacs could only be built on
>> brand-new Linux releases.
>
> Thatʼs a somewhat unfair statement: emacs 26 works fine on Ubuntu
> 14.04 as far as I know, itʼs just the xwidgets support that doesnʼt,
> so in no way is there any 'abandonment' going on.
>
> The change should perhaps have been mentioned in NEWS, but I believe
> xwidgets is still classed as experimental, so perhaps not.
>
>> This system comes with libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev.  It is prohibitive to
>> attempt to install anything newer since the whole software stack would
>> need to be replaced.
>
> Emacs moved to the WebKit2 API in October of 2016. Iʼm assuming there
> were good reasons for not trying to support the older API as well. Iʼm
> also assuming there were good reasons for nobody running Ubuntu 14.04
> to attempt to build emacs with xwidget support since then.

Initially there was an attempt to support both gtk2 and gtk3, but it was
difficult, so the gtk2 support was abandoned. It is not impossible in
principle though, just not doable with the existing resources. Also, the
state of emacs webkit support should not reflect badly on the rest of emacs.

>
> Robert
>
-- 
Joakim Verona
joakim@verona.se
+46705459454