[mythtv-users] Compiling without qtwebkit

[Tom Dexter]

My Gentoo frontend and backend despite their age are working about
flawlessly for me for OTA HD TV as they have for many years. The
frontend now has a GT 430 nVidia card so I'm able to use advanced 2x
etc. About the only thing I can't do is play 4K video, which I don't
need. I even have redundant computers I got on the cheap so I can
usually be back up and running in no time if something breaks. Given
that I'm really not in a hurry to upgrade any hardware.

What's starting to become an issue is that I just about need better
hardware to compile qtwebkit (and i have no interest in moving to any
binary distro). So far I've been able to compile it, but it takes
forever, and newer versions are getting worse. At this point I'd
really like to do whatever hack it takes to get rid of it. I brought
up the topic of the qtwebkit dependency here several years ago, and as
I understand it, it's for MythBrowser which in turn is used for
several other plugins...none of which I use.

I read in a few places that you can compile without it and that it
does in fact work. I was actually able to prove that out on this
machine, which doesn't have qtwebkit installed, by modifying the
configure script so as to not require it, and just hard coding it with
"disable qtwebkit". I'd like to go with this on my frontend and
backend but here's my main concern: I tested a compile (though not an
install) on one of those machines and it's clear that it links in all
the qtwebkit stuff simply by virtue of it being installed. I'm VERY
leery of uninstalling qtwebkit first in order to do this because...in
the event that I run into issues...I'll be down for the entire time it
takes me to recompile that monster.

What exactly is it about the presence of qtwebkit that causes it to
get pulled in? Is the existence of the headers etc in
/usr/include/qt5/QtWebKit and /usr/include/qt5/QtWebKitWidgets? What
I'm hoping is that I can possibly fake out the build, for example by
temporarily moving something.

Thanks in advance.
Tom