#1101034 Add ppc64el support to qtwebengine

Package:
libqt6webenginecore6
Source:
libqt6webenginecore6
Description:
Qt 6 WebEngine Core library
Submitter:
Alexis PM
Date:
2025-08-16 20:51:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1101034#5
Date:
2025-03-22 10:18:53 UTC
From:
To:
Hello

qtwebengine has the noticeable lack of not supporting one of the standing architectures for the stable debian releases: ppc64el.

This has been reported upstream:
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-56465
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-120034

The reason used is that there is no official support of ppc64el in Chromium.

But Debian's Chromium supports ppc64el, there are binaries of chromium for ppc64el since 2022:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1005083#40

Due to the time elapsed since the upstream reports, I think it is appropriate to apply the necessary changes downstream in Debian.

Thank you very much.

#1101034#10
Date:
2025-03-22 17:22:58 UTC
From:
To:
I think the best place to focus your efforts in on upstream Qt
WebEngine.  Debian is unlikely to ship support for an architecture in
a package as complex as Qt WebEngine if it is not supported upstream.

#1101034#17
Date:
2025-08-16 20:48:33 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

On Sat, 22 Mar 2025 10:22:58 -0700 Soren Stoutner <soren@debian.org>  wrote:
[...]

Whether upstream supports a certain architecture, is not really the
criterion in Debian to make it work.
i386 isn't supported in qtwebengine, yet we put in some effort to make it
work. Why ? Because it's only 2 small patches and that is absolutely
maintainable.

Now, why don't we build qtwebengine for ppc64el ? Chromium has 60 (!!!)
patches for ppc64el alone. I don't know how many of those would be
needed for qtwebengine and how many of those need regular rebasing, but
I have no intention of finding that out on my own.

Adding more architectures to qtwebengine is matter of resources and
maintainability. Unfortunately, ppc64el is at the wrong end of that
scale.