Webkitgtk problem

[John Ralls]

> On Oct 30, 2017, at 4:00 PM, Hamidreza Jafari <hamidrjafari at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Manjaro was running GnuCash smoothly until some system update introduced 
> quirks. Now I receive this error message:
> 
> GnuCash: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: 
> cairo_gl_surface_get_width
> 
> Then Arch folk provide the solution which requires some housekeeping and 
> library building. Check the pinned comment: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gnucash/?comments=all
> 
> AFAIK GnuCash was planning to move away from the dreaded webkit. Is that 
> correct? Then how does this new 2.7.1 relate to the problem? Or 2.8.0. I want 
> to justify waiting for the community build, building from scratch or moving to 
> another environment for the moment.

Well, we’d like to move away from WebKit, it’s using a nuclear weapon as a flyswatter. We don’t have the developer time to do so and our hand has been forced a bit by several distros dropping support for WebKit1. What we’ve done instead for the next major release (for which 2.7.1 is an alpha release) is switch to WebKit2 on Linux/BSD. Unfortunately WebKit2 isn’t supported at all on Windows and doesn’t work quite right on MacOS so those platforms will continue to use WebKit1.

Note as well that there are several other significant dependency changes for GnuCash 2.7/8:

Removed: Gtk+-2.0, GOffice, libgnomecanvas
Added: Gtk+-3.0, boost, googletest

Regards,
John Ralls