It's been a long time coming ..

Tobias and Raphael pushed the button today to push QtWebEngine into FreeBSD ports. This has been a monumental effort, because the codebase is just .. ugh. Not meant for third-party consumption, let's say. There are 76 patches needed to get it to compile at all. Lots of annoying changes to make, like explaining that pkg-config is not a Linux-only technology. Nor is NSS, or Mesa, while #include is, in fact, Linux-only. Lots of patches can be shared with the Chromium browser, but it's a terrible time-sink nonetheless.

This opens the way for some other ports to be updated -- ports with QtWebEngine dependencies, like Luminance (an HDR-image-processing application).

The QtWebEngine parts have been in use for quite some time in the plasma5/ branch of Area51, so for users of the unofficial ports, this announcement is hardly news. Konqueror with QtWebEngine underneath is a fine and capable browser; my go-to if I have Plasma5 available at all on FreeBSD.