suggestion: split off qt5-qtwebengine to a standalone port

[RJVB (René Bertin)]

I just learned that the Qt devs are

trying to support though is building a newer qtwebengine.git against older Qt versions (usually last LTS). [...] But you can build qtwebengine 5.11 branch against Qt 5.9.

I haven't checked if QWE 5.11 also builds on all Mac OS versions where Qt 5.9 builds, but apart from that this is a pretty good reason to split off the QWE subport and make it standalone. That way users can benefit from the latest and thus most secure QWE.

[MarcusCalhoun-Lopez (Marcus Calhoun-Lopez)]

I was unaware of this.
Thank you for the information.

Since the qt5*-qtwebengines are already supports, couldn't we just update each one as needed?
For example, if

• qtwebengine 5.11 built against Qt 5.9, and
• qtwebengine 5.11 built on all platforms that Qt 5.9 did,

it would be fairy easy to add something like:

if { ${subport} eq "${name}-qtwebengine" } {
    version         5.11.x
}

to qt59-qtwebengine.

For a time, qt59-qtwebengine and qt5-qtwebengine would essentially install the same thing, but eventually, Qt 5.9 would almost certainly be dropped, and we would then be free to pin qt59-qtwebengine to the last version that worked.

[RJVB (René Bertin)]

That would work too, and it might be easier to test-build each of those qt5x-qtwebengine subports. Then again you can also argue that the CI and buildbots are there for doing that, esp. for something as huge as QtWebEngine but even the copy/pasting and managing any patchfiles required quickly becomes a monk's task (with such a big and complex Portfile).

Initially I thought that qt5x-qtwebengine could be maintained (and provide QWE 5.x) for the purists but you're right that at some point QWE 5.1x will no longer build against Qt 5.9 . That could be handled with replaced_by qt59-qtwebengine if the active Qt version is 5.9, in addition to checking the OS version (which would limit the QWE version as needed). I can't really foretell what's best; I guess only practice can tell.

Things are probably a bit easier with the rebooted QtWebkit for which I maintain a standalone port - for now at least.

[MarcusCalhoun-Lopez (Marcus Calhoun-Lopez)]

Since we have another possible route to go with this issue, I will close this ticket.
We can reopen it if the current plan does not pan out.