Dear Maintainer,

When loading plugin, webkit complains it couldn't find WebKitPluginProcess with
the following error message:

Unable to fork a new child process: Failed to execute child process “/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/webkit2gtk-4.0/WebKitPluginProcess” (No such file or directory)

I have downloaded and built the source of this package. I found that
WebKitPluginProcess was actually built but wasn't copied to the installation
directory after "sudo make install". If I manually copy WebKitPluginProcess to
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/webkit2gtk-4.0/ then the plugin will work.

That's all. Thank you for your attention.

Control: found -1 2.30.1-1
Control: forwarded -1 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220154

Thanks, this is an upstream bug and it affects all 2.30.x releases.

Out of curiosity, what plugin is that? Upstream will remove support
for NPAPI plugins altogether in future releases:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215503

Berto

Dear Alerto,

Thanks for your notification. I am sad to hear that the plugin support
will be removed.

The plugin is our company's in house program to provide a way to
communicate between C/C++ and JavaScript, makes it possible for the
connected primitive hardware to play some roles in the evolving Internet
world.

We don't use the full features of NPAPI, but just the calling/passing
functions and information between the browser and the underneath lower
level system/hardware resources.

If removing of the plugin is inevitable, we will need to find an
alternative of WebKit to fulfill our goal.

Would it be possible to keep an older version of the plugin enabled
WebKit? Like, the new WebKit would be version 3, and let the old one
survive as WebKit 2 and stay as it is?

Thanks for your attention.

Regards
Ben

Hi Ben, and sorry for the late reply.

There's going to be a new release (2.30.5) one of these days with the
plugin process installed again, but the next stable branch (2.32.x)
won't support NPAPI plugins.

All major web browsers have removed support for these plugins, perhaps
you could use a Web Extension?

https://blogs.igalia.com/carlosgc/2013/09/10/webkit2gtk-web-process-extensions/

You can always keep the latest version that supports plugins
installed. If what you're asking is "Can we keep that package
officially in Debian together with the newer versions?" then I'm
afraid that this is too much of a maintenance burden for this feature.

But you can do that locally, i.e., modify and rebuild the package so
it is co-installable with other versions of webkit. I can maybe help
you if you have problems with that.

Berto

Dear Berto,

Thanks a lot for you reply and provided information. For now we are
going to apt-mark hold the libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev package. So we can stay
on the plugin-enabled version for the remaining life cycle of Debian 10.
We might download the latest version and build it to enable plugin if we
find it's very needed. We will also keep a copy of the source of v2.30.5
just in case we cannot make the latest version work.

Actually during these few days, we have found a quite suitable
alternative to the WebKit/Plugin architecture. It's called NWJS/NAPI. We
find it can almost fully fulfill our needs and also quite easy to
migrate to. The only drawback is, we cannot host the our application
from network, everything must be at the local machine. Though this
doesn't bring much negative impact to us.

Therefore, we can still keep on using WebKit/Plugin for some time. I
will look into your web extension suggestion too.

I thank you and appreciate your kind concern and help.

Regards
Ben

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
webkit2gtk, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 978042@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com> (supplier of updated webkit2gtk package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2021 14:23:52 +0100
Source: webkit2gtk
Architecture: source
Version: 2.30.5-1
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: high
Maintainer: Debian WebKit Maintainers <pkg-webkit-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Changed-By: Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com>
Closes: 977779 978042 979170
Changes:
 webkit2gtk (2.30.5-1) unstable; urgency=high
 .
   * New upstream release (Closes: #978042).
   * Remove some obsolete build dependencies (Closes: #979170):
     + gawk is not needed since WebKitGTK switched from autotools to CMake.
     + libgeoclue-2-dev and geoclue-2.0 are not required since WebKitGTK
       2.25.1 (upstream bug 195994).
     + libupower-glib-dev is not required since WebKitGTK 2.19.92 (upstream
       bug 181825).
     + libfile-copy-recursive-perl is not required since WebKitGTK 2.19.3
       (upstream bug 180479).
     + mesa-common-dev used to provide GL/gl.h but this header is now in
       libgl-dev.
     + libgles2-mesa-dev used to provide GLES3/gl3.h but this header is now
       in libgles-dev.
     + libgl1-mesa-dev and libgles2-mesa-dev are now dummy packages.
     + libpango1.0-dev is not checked for any specific version at build
       time so there's no need to list it.
   * Update the minimum required versions of some packages:
     + cmake from 3.3 to 3.10
     + libglib2.0-dev from 2.36.0 to 2.44.0
     + libgtk-3-dev from 3.10.0 to 3.22.0
     + libcairo2-dev from 1.10.2 to 1.14.0
     + libsoup2.4-dev from 2.42.0 to 2.54.0.
   * debian/patches/fix-mips-page-size.patch:
     + Increase the page size from 4KB to 16KB on MIPS, this fixes a crash
       with Loongson CPUs that don't support 4KB pages (Closes: #977779).
   * debian/copyright:
     + Update copyright years.
   * debian/watch:
     + Set version to 4 (fixes older-debian-watch-file-standard).
   * debian/control:
     + Update Standards-Version to 4.5.1 (no changes).
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Files:
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