Requirements for a Stable Release

[Toni Ruottu]

  Good day!

Is someone keeping track of what exactly needs to be done before the next stable release? Are there still some incomplete features in the pipeline or is all work concentrated on stabilizing the current release candidate?

  Cheers, --Toni

[Jakob Truelsen]

We need to hack qt, to be able to build webkit into a static binary.

/Jakob

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[Toni Ruottu]

Is there a bug thread in some qt bug tracker somewhere for tracking the problem?

[Jakob Truelsen]

No. They have expelicitly decided not to support static compilation of
webkit. So we have to either fix/undo thouse changesa and put the
fixes into http://qt.gitorious.org/~antialize/qt/antializes-qt/commits/4.8.4,
or change our release model, and somehow release in a none static way.
The only way I have found to do this is to compile qt and add the
dependincies and put then into a /opt dir, but this also seems hard.

/Jakob

[Ryan]

Have you looked at the PhantomJS project? They too use Qt and Webkit, and despite using Qt 4.8.4, they're still building a single self contained exe (including openssl and c run time).

Check my question on their forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/phantomjs/R2EUBDqf0BQ

Their very simple build process: http://phantomjs.org/build.html

blog post from author: http://ariya.ofilabs.com/2012/03/the-evolution-of-phantomjs-build-workflow.html

[Ryan]

I've built a single wkhtmltopdf.exe using http://qt.gitorious.org/~antialize/qt/antializes-qt/commits/4.8.4 , using some of the PhantomJS patches to build.

Been running some tests and comparing to the previous release of wkhtmltopdf.

Looks good, except I'm not sure about the page breaking. Some pages look better with new version, but others look much worse.

For example I get the first 4 pages being almost completely blank with the new code. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Outlines

See attached files.

Is page breaking still in progress?

[Kees van Spelde]

Hi Ryan,

Did you already solve your problem or does it still exists?

Greetings

[Ryan]

Compiling wise everything is fine. 

Problem is page breaking has really regressed from earlier versions. I undid all of Trevor North's commits in the 4.8.4 branch, which improved things a lot, but still worse then the last official release. There's not much left to undo in the 4.8.4 branch so I might try the 4.8.2 branch and see how page breaking is there. 

Unfortunately page breaking as it is, is a show stopper for me, so hopefully it can be at least returned to wkhtmltopdf 0.11 quality. 

I guess this is where the lack of established tests for this project has allowed things to regress.

Unfortunately, right now busy with other tasks so it will be at least a month before I can get back to this subject.

[Kees van Spelde]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the update. Could you please keep me informed if you succeed in making a new wkhtmltopdf version with the 4.8.2 or 4.8.4 branch?

Greetings,
Kees

[Asfand Yar Qazi]

Hello,

Forgive me all for my ignorance, but instead of trying to get a new release out with all the latest libs, would it not be possible to get out an interim release with the same QT the current release is compiled with, but the latest version of WebKit?  That way we get to use the latest WebKit goodies for our HTML/CSS while the PDF generation is still in a stable state as in the current release.

Thanks

[Ryan]

That was the first thing that I looked into, as for me too, I'm really just interested in using the latest webkit. Unfortunately applying the wkhtmltopdf patches to Qt and Webkit is non-trivial (at least it is to me as I'm certainly no git expert) as some of the folder structure of webkit/qt has changed. Plus some files may have been moved/renamed/deleted. And what you describe, just upgrading webkit, separate from wkhtmltopdf and qt, may be even harder.

[Toni Ruottu]

I am still missing something. Why can't we do dynamic linking? Is that because wkhtmltopdf does not work with a regular Qt? What kind of modifications are required? Is the Qt team hesitant of accepting patches that make it possible to use wkhtmltopdf with a regular qt release?

[Ryan]

Why can't we do dynamic linking?

Valid point, I don't know of any technical reason wkhtmltopdf could not have the webkit in a separate dll. The wkhtmltopdf package already includes other dependencies such, as OpenSSL, in separate files. However, at least some of us prefer to have everything in one file (qt/webkit/openssl).

Assuming you're ok with the extra files in the package, then the remaining issue preventing a new release is the broken page breaking on the latest branches.

[John]

Hello Ryan,

how did you get it to compile statically?

greetings,

John

On Friday, May 17, 2013 12:59:16 AM UTC+2, Ryan wrote:

[leslie Lau]

Awesome work has been done here to get latest to compile statically:

There are a few other changes required to build the windows-version, see his fork https://github.com/arbruijn/wkhtmltopdf 

It modifies scripts/static-build.sh to patch Qt with the static-compilation patches after retrieving it from the repository and to create the dummy perl.exe, so it should just work.

It even compiles the windows version in Linux environment.  I was able to successfully compile a windows version in a Linux Lite virtual machine.