Migrating from jsaddle-webkit2gtk to jsaddle-webkitgtk

[maralorn]

Recently gi-soup2 got marked as insecure in nixos. This breaks the build of the corresponding haskell-gi libs and reflex-dom. My understanding is that there are two possibilities. Upgrading to webkit 4.1 + gi-soup 3 or webkit 6.0 + gi-soup 3. The former combination seems not available in haskell-gi, but the later exists with gi-webkit and even in jsaddle with jsaddle-webkitgtk. So if I understand all of this correctly we should just do this.

[maralorn]

I realize now that haskell-gi switched gi-webkit from being very old to being very new in 2023. Compare the history of https://hackage.haskell.org/package/gi-webkit-6.0.2 and haskell-gi/haskell-gi@bd92a65#diff-908e58e057cef4763c43179ff28796f74a085bc41fc53cf126ba085cffe880de

Sadly jsaddle-webkitgtk hasn’t had commits since then. So possibly it will need to be adapted to the newer version.

[danieljentsch]

I would like to help getting this fixed, since I would benefit from being able to build a haskell project which depends on reflex-dom, using nix. I am not sure where to begin, though. Any pointers as to what I could do are appreciated.

[maralorn]

@danieljentsch Is your roadblock just that reflex-dom is not compiling? Which jsaddle backend do you want to target?

[danieljentsch]

Is your roadblock just that reflex-dom is not compiling?

For now, yes.

Which jsaddle backend do you want to target?

jsaddle-js would be enough for now. jsaddle-warp would be nice. Ideally, I would like to be able to use it with jsaddle-webkitgtk once that works again without any extra work.

[maralorn]

Yeah, okay. I admit I am not 100% sure how hard this is. I would start by checking out the jsaddle-webkitgtk repo and and see whether you can get it to run with gi-webkit.

But just to be clear, you should be able to use reflex-dom-core without this fix und you can also use reflex-dom you just need to override the cabal flag that it does not target jsaddle-webkit2gtk but jsaddle-warp. on js and wasm it should already automatically target the right backend.