Postponing WebEngine, trying Nuitka

I posted a polite & constructive note to the WebEngine development list asking for a timeline on when some of the missing features might appear. No replies as yet.

Trying Cobro under Qt5.4 I am very pleased to see that the Webkit version is now behaving itself. There were several comics that it would display incorrectly. This failure was always that some small image file on the page would be shown at 1000% zoom and overlay the rest of the rendered page. It made Penny Arcade, for example, unreadable.

In addition there were at least four failure modes I've been documenting over the past few months of daily use. In no particular order,

• Emitting a stream of a hundred or more messages "Critical failure: the LastResort font is unavailable", then a segfault.
• "QEventDispatcherUNIXPrivate(): Unable to create thread pipe: Too many open files... Abort trap: 6"
• Segfault 11 somewhere deep in the Mac OS innards, usually with QNetworkConfiguration in the stack trace.
• Segfault nested 50 or more calls deep in Webkit rendering code.

It typically crashed in one of these ways every 3 or 4 times I ran it. That was clearly unacceptable. I didn't mind it, just sigh and restart it, but I could never distribute a program that was so unreliable. I was really looking forward to changing to WebEngine and leaving all those nasty bugs behind. Unfortunately that appears not to be, because WebEngine doesn't support several functions that, although minor, I want to have for proper operation. The ability to command "private" (uncached) browsing, for example. It would be unacceptable to have the residue of browsing comics in one's work-browser's cache. Or the ability to implement the custom context menu I wrote, that lets you right-click on a link and make it open in the default browser. Can't do that under WebEngine because it lacks the feature of Webkit that lets you find out what type of data was under the mouse, and if a URL, get its text.

However, after several uses, the 5.4 Webkit browser has displayed none of the above problems. It handles Penny Arcade and Stand Still Stay Silent perfectly, and they were unreadable with 5.3. And none of the crashes has happened yet either.

So, I'm going to shelve the conversion to WebEngine for now. I've gone ahead to put in a couple of minor feature enhancements that I had in mind for some time, and I will continue reading comics with it daily, and just maybe it will prove reliable.

Meanwhile, I downloaded Nuitka and tried to install it. Unfortunately, although it claims to support all of Python through 3.4, the code executed by its setup.py displayed a number of syntax errors that were clearly due to byte-compiling Python 2 code under Python 3.4—missing parens on a print statement, for example.

So I joined yet another goddam dev mailing list and sent a polite query about this. Maybe tomorrow I'll get a reply from one group or the other.