Gnucash 2.6.10 question - Why WebKit ?

[John Ralls]

> On Dec 28, 2015, at 5:01 AM, Arno <nvana_31 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear GNUCash developers,
> 
> I have a question:
> 
> Wouldn't it be possible to compile GNUCash 2.6.10 without WebKit support ? I have been using GNUcash for 10+ years now, but since the switch to WebKit only (no other rendering options any more) I cannot get GNUcash to compile any more on my RedHat based Linux systems.
> 
> For me a simple a simple switch like '--with-html-engine: none' would also be great, why not have the generated HTML files opened in Firefox ? It would be fine for me.
> 
> Showing the content in tabs looks great, but if it makes compiling GNUcash on any other system than Ubuntu almost impossible. So I would suggest to have the option for an external HTML viewer.
> 
> I've been trying to compile GNUcash (even the older 2.4 versions) for days on CentOS 7, but to no avail. Been trying to tweak the configure system to use webkitgtk-3, qtwebkit, etc, but it all fails.
> 
> At the moment I see not many other options than running GNUcash in a virtual machine running Win7 or leaving GNUcash behind.

GnuCash 2.4 can be compiled with the old GtkHTML library. Support for that was removed in 2.6 as it's no longer being maintained.

The development team use Debian stable and Fedora systems routinely for development, so it's clearly not the case that it compiles only on Ubuntu. GnuCash uses Gtk2 for its GUI, so you must use WebKitGtk-2. `yum-builddep gnucash` should get you everything you need, though you may need to include a Fedora rpm repository in your list as IIRC Centos/RHEL doesn't support GnuCash.

Regards,
John Ralls