Wine Gecko status

[Jacek Caban]

Hi Michael,

On 8/9/19 8:02 PM, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Hi,
>
> What is the status of development regarding Wine Gecko? The last 
> general release was June 2016. As the maintainer in Fedora I have a 
> few concerns that I would like to address.
>
> 1. The build scripts require Python 2. Fedora is dropping Python 2 in 
> Fedora 31/32. 31 is only a few months away from GA.
> 2. I have been unable to build from source with the latest MinGW 
> toolset since November 2016. I've last reported this directly to Jacek 
> in 2018, but I have never heard from him.
> 3. If no support arrives, I don't have the time to patch wine-gecko. 
> It will be dropped from Fedora and users will be downloading the 
> binaries from winehq.org. This provides a reduced user experience and 
> I would like to prevent it. 


I do plan to do a new release as soon as I will be able to work on it 
and it's high on my TODO list. Earlier this year I was waiting for new 
Wine Mono out-of-prefix installation to settle so I can do the same for 
Gecko. I believe that it's proven right already, so it's just ETA is 
limited only by my time at this point.


Historically, I was doing regular releases every few Firefox releases. 
Sadly, at some point, it became impossible for us to use newer Gecko. 
That's why releases are no longer as regular as they were in the past. 
The next release will be still based on Gecko 47. And I agree it's been 
way too long, I'm definitely not happy about that. I have quite a few 
changes I'd like to do for the release and that includes fixing building 
with newer mingw-w64. I can't promise Python 3 support through. Gecko 
build scripts are very complex and I'm not a Python expert. I will look 
at it, but if it happens to require too much effort, I may decide to 
postpone that for future releases.


BTW, I just checked that I replied to your private email in May last 
year. I didn't have anything concrete to say, but you should have heard 
from me ;)


Thanks,

Jacek