[Qgis-developer] Broken Python Plugins on QGIS 2.16 Ubuntu 16

[Akbar Gumbira]

Hi,

I just knew about this problem (which actually has been there for quite
some time). It seems that the released QGIS 2.16 for Ubuntu 16 is packaged
without QtWebKit. I see that other plugins: lrs, InaSAFE, qgis2web,
QuickOSM (and many others probably) are affected too.

   - LRS: https://github.com/blazek/lrs/issues/9
   - QGIS2web: https://github.com/tomchadwin/qgis2web/issues/309
   - QGIS Resource Sharing:
   https://github.com/akbargumbira/qgis_resources_sharing/issues/25
   - Quick OSM: https://github.com/3liz/QuickOSM/issues/84


I tried to compile QGIS without QtWebKit and I could replicate the issue.
The problem is that as python plugin developers, we couldn't do much as the
QtWebKit module from python side is actually there. I thought I could just
try to import QtWebKit and if it's failed just use QTextBrowser. But the
crash happened when we try to call some methods (and we couldn't catch it
from the python side). Of course for some plugins they might be able to
compensate this (either using QTextBrowser as an alternative or just remove
it). Personally for my plugin, I would hesitate to replace QWebView with
QTextBrowser as this problem only affects Ubuntu 16 users with the released
QGIS 2.16. Of course we could check the host, but again some users also
compile QGIS themselves.

So, what should we do to overcome this issue? Is there perhaps a flag (e.g
telling if QGIS is compiled with/without webkit) that we can use?

Cheers

-- 

*-------------------*
*Akbar Gumbira *
*www.akbargumbira.com <http://www.akbargumbira.com>*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/attachments/20160820/74fead16/attachment.html>