#914568 emacs25: Please build with xwidget support

Package:
emacs25
Source:
emacs
Submitter:
John Goerzen
Date:
2025-07-28 19:39:10 UTC
Severity:
wishlist
#914568#5
Date:
2018-11-25 02:09:04 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

Over at
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Embedded-WebKit-Widgets.html
, the xwidget-webkit-browse-url function is documented.

C-h a also lists it, and it is apparently defined in xwidget.el.

However, when I run M-x xwidget-webkit-browse-url, I get: "Your Emacs
was not compiled with xwidgets support"

Thanks,

John
#914568#10
Date:
2018-11-25 17:40:45 UTC
From:
To:
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:

Ahh, so that's intentional; from the Debian changelog:

  * Disable xwidget (webkit) support.  Thanks to David Bremner for
    reporting the issue. (Closes: 843462)

i.e. https://bugs.debian.org/843462

Assuming those concerns are still valid, then I suspect we wouldn't want
to (re)enable support in the primary package, and if we did eventually
provide some kind of support, it should be solidly opt-in.

If there's no simpler option (i.e. a reliable, upstream
enable-webkit-support defcustom or something) I suppose we could
consider providing a new package flavor, but first we'd need to decide
that the benefit was worth the extra cost/complexity.

In the shorter term, if it's feasible you could build local packages
after installing libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev and adding:

  confflags_gtk += --with-xwidgets

to debian/rules (or in the older emacsXY packages):

  confflags_x += --with-xwidgets

Then, the resulting emacs (or emacsXY) package should have support.  Of
course, we could also try to make that easier to build.
#914568#15
Date:
2018-12-24 11:22:33 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

Emacs >= 26.1 builds with the new (4.0) libwebkit2gtk API which,
to the best of my knowledge is supported. At least, it's in buster
with no serious bugs. (It's a different source package than the
one mentioned in #843462.)

Seems it could be a good time to re-introduce xwidgets support in
Emacs?

It'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for considering,
#914568#20
Date:
2018-12-24 22:41:39 UTC
From:
To:
Dato <dato@debian.org> writes:

check-security-status also says webkit2gtk is unsupported. So unless I
miss something, nothing has significantly changed with respect to
xwidgets.

d
#914568#31
Date:
2019-01-07 03:44:49 UTC
From:
To:
Okay, fair enough.

It would still be nice, though, to have an emacs-xwidgets package.

Unfortunately, it is not feasible to have it built in unstable
from the ‘emacs’ source package, because it would have to migrate
to testing; it's not possible to migrate a subset of binary
packages.

Two options I can think of are:

  1. have a separate emacs-xwidgets _source_ package, confined to
     unstable.

  2. ‘abuse’ the experimental suite, and re-upload there every
     unstable version verbatim, with xwidgets support....

     2.a: ... in a separate emacs-xwidgets package, OR
     2.b: ... in the main emacs package

(2.a) would need checking with ftpmaster, just to be sure they're
okay; (2.b) is simpler but misleading (upgrading from experimental
to a higher version in unstable will _lose_ you features). (1) is
typically frowned upon.

Just to be clear, I can volunteer to make these uploads if needed.
I'm rebuilding form myself anyway.

Cheers,
#914568#36
Date:
2019-01-07 13:54:12 UTC
From:
To:
Dato Simó <dato@debian.org> writes:

FWIW, I would not be enthusiastic about 2.b. I think the converse issue
of people upgrading to xwidgets support would not necessarily be
desirable.

d
#914568#41
Date:
2019-01-07 15:12:26 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

That's a fair observation I hadn't thought about. 2.b's out, then.

Thanks for considering,