Re: Any interest in using HTML for locally-installed Texinfo documentation?

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Apr 08, 2019 at 05:12:17PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Neat!
> 
> From a “social” viewpoint, I think WebKitGTK would be more appropriate,
> GTK+/GNOME being affiliated with GNU.

It's the "social" viewpoint that will make it a success.  We don't just
need a proof-of-concept or something that is 95% complete, we need something 
that is reliable and complete, and that people will find easy to install 
and use, and also that we can continue to develop and maintain.

I'm still trying to implement very basic functionality in the Qt code.
I will probably push on with it and see how far I get.  If GTK is used 
instead, the needed functionality would be present, and the Qt code 
would be a prototype.

I expect it would be easier to integrate GTK-based code with an automake 
build system (Qt has its own build system tool, qmake).  I understand 
from reading various blogs and so forth that GTK has its own problems, 
too.  However, it is still plausible that it could be used.

> Also, QtWebEngine relies on bits of Chromium, which is a real challenge
> from a software freedom viewpoint and from a security viewpoint, to the
> point that we ended up removing it from our Qt builds in Guix:
> 
>   https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/qt.scm#n143
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-06/msg00302.html

Those messages don't give a very promising picture.

I like the idea of a simple help browser with few dependencies, as it 
means you still be able to get some help even if more complicated/novel 
things are broken.