Gnucash 2.6.10 question - Why WebKit ?

[Geert Janssens]

On Monday 28 December 2015 13:01:59 Arno 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.
> 
> Greetings, Arno
> 
Hi Arno,

I'm sorry you're having such a hard time building gnucash.

It is possible to build gnucash 2.6.10 on CentOS 7 and it's as easy/difficult as it is on Fedora.

In fact I'm maintaining a copr repository which does nightly automated builds for the stable 
gnucash series here:

https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/gjanssens/gnucash-maint/

That repository is also available for CentOS 7. Just to illustrate it's possible on Centos 7 with no 
changes from the Fedora build.

You can use this repository to install gnucash on Centos 7 also if you like. You just have to 
configure your system such that yum checks this repository and then you can simply install 
gnucash on CentOS 7 using "yum install gnucash". The caveat is this repository tracks the 
development on the stable branch of gnucash, so installing from this repo will give you gnucash 
2.6.10 + all changes already committed but to be released only in 2.6.11 in the future.

In addition there is also the EPEL project:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

This project ports various packages from Fedora to Centos/RHEL. Their repository currently 
ships gnucash 2.6.6.

I believe both options should make it easy to install gnucash on CentOS 7 without the need to 
build yourself.

If you prefer to build gnucash yourself instead, I'm willing to help you get through there, 
although that's probably a topic better suited for the gnucash-devel list. As a first hint, you 
would need libwebkitgtk2 and not libwebkitgtk3. And additionally, you'll need to install the -
devel packages of most dependencies, not only the libraries themselves (a pitfall most users 
new to compiling fall into unfortunately).

I hope this helps you get going.

Regards,

Geert