[GNC] Compiling 2.6.19

[john]

> On Oct 13, 2021, at 11:43 PM, AC <gnucash at acarver.net> wrote:
> 
> I'm having a bit of trouble compiling 2.6.19 (so that I can begin the
> upgrade process for the data) but the dependencies are not being met.
> 
> All the base dependency packages are installed but the versioning seems
> to be off or package names have changed and don't expose old library
> names.  For example, I'm installing on Debian 9 Buster and I get errors
> about webkit-1.0 despite having installed despite having
> libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev, libqtwebkit-dev, libqt5webkit5-dev,
> libkf5webkit-dev, and just about every other webkit library I can find
> installed.  I did also run the build-dep to pull in anything else.
> 
> There's probably going to be others but the configure script stops at
> the webkit test.
> 
> The package manager only has up to 3.4 and I'm trying to make my way to 4.8.

WebKit1 and WebKit2 are different APIs, and the last WebKitGtk that supported the WebKit1 API was 2.4.11. Browser software is for nearly all users the best attack vector into their machines and so gets the most attention from both security researchers and the bad guys. Distros aren't comfortable shipping old browser software, but for several years most of them kept WebKitGtk-2.4.11 specifically to support GnuCash only because GnuCash doesn't connect it to the outside; we been stuck on that release because it was the last one to support Gtk2 and we were in no hurry to update our GUI to Gtk3. That stopped the summer before our scheduled release of 3.0: Several distro packagers notified us that the upcoming releases of their distros wouldn't have WebKitGtk-2.4.11 and we had to scramble to upgrade the GUI to Gtk3 and to support the WebKit2 API; it delayed the release of GnuCash 3.0 by 3 months.

If your package manager has GnuCash 3.4 then it doesn't have WebKitGtk 2.4.11. You can get the source from downloads.gnome.org <http://downloads.gnome.org/> and build it yourself or you can get an ISO from an older version of your distro and boot it in live-cd mode to build GnuCash 2.6.21 and prepare your data file for upgrading to GnuCash 3.

Regards,
John Ralls