Gnucash 2.6.10 question - Why WebKit ?

[John Ralls]

> On Dec 29, 2015, at 4:12 AM, Arno <nvana_31 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear John,
> 
> I like building apps from source, but not the fundamentals of the O/S like GTK or Webkit anything in that area. As far as I can see rebuilding these items almost involves rebuilding the distribution. 
> 
> I am only telling you that GNUcash is the hardest app in my list to build because of the Apple WebKit requirement. As far as today I does not compile/work any more for me. it used to be an issue on CentOS 6 that only 2.4.x would work, now both versions don't work...
> 
> I think there will be many more people in the world running into this compilation problem with GNUcash. Why not make WebKit optional ? It would save alot of troubles for people not willing to run a beta test OS like Fedora or Ubuntu.

Dear Arno,

GnuCash was once famous for being a pain to build because of all of the dependencies, but distros have mostly fixed that problem. I already told you how to use yum-builddep to get all of the correct dependencies installed and Geert pointed you to his robot build machine running the same distro you're complaining about. You're doing something wrong. You'd be better off addressing that than whining about WebKitGtk.

Why not make WebKit optional? Because it would seriously degrade the usability of the program for most users. We'd like a lighter-weight way to render html + javascript, but haven't yet found anything that meets GnuCash's needs. Besides, we don't have infinite bandwidth and have a long list of work which we think more important. If you want to do the necessary work and submit a patch we'll consider it.

Regards,
John Ralls