Change UbuntuWebView namespace to Ubuntu.Browser

[Michael Hall]

The Ubuntu.Components.Extras namespace (and sub-namespaces) are not technically part of the Ubuntu SDK (they are "extra"), which means that their use is not encouraged for app developers outside of experimentation. Since we want to encourage the use of the UbuntuWebView component (and discourage he use of QTWebkit), we need to move it outside of the .Extras namespace.

The precedent for other components is simple Ubuntu.${project}. For example, content-hub has Ubuntu.Content, online accounts has Ubuntu.OnlineAccounts, etc. Following that, UbuntuWebView should reside in the namespace Ubuntu.Browser.

Dropping the component from the old namespace will break some apps in the store that are using it. The list of those apps can be found here: https://chinstrap.canonical.com/~alan/log.txt

If it would work, adding a symlink from the old location to the new might allow those apps to keep working after the change.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

That’s currently 20 apps in the store using UbuntuWebView.
It doesn’t sound right that the compatibility mode (i.e. having Ubuntu.Components.Extras.Browser redirect to Ubuntu.Browser somehow) is considered optional, I don’t think we want to break 20 apps in the store and justify it by saying: sorry, you were using an unsupported API (particularly when there wasn’t an alternative supported API).

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

Lets maintain compatibility with the old name and mark it deprecated.

Why the change from Webview to Browser? Seems the webview name is well understood, or are we providing a much richer API?

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Also note that the package ubuntu-html5-container depends on qtdeclarative5-ubuntu-ui-extras-browser-plugin (which ships UbuntuWebView), so this package would have to be updated together with this namespace change happening (and to do things properly, qtdeclarative5-ubuntu-ui-extras-browser-plugin should also be renamed qtdeclarative5-ubuntu-browser-plugin).

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

As discussed today in a hangout with bfiller, dbarth, alex-abreu and jdstrand, the namespace change makes sense but the timing couldn’t be worse so it’s very unlikely to happen for 14.04.

I’ll keep the issue on my radar and will address as soon as I get spare cycles post 14.04.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

> Why the change from Webview to Browser? Seems the webview name is well understood,
> or are we providing a much richer API?

The current namespace is "Ubuntu.Components.Extras.Browser", and the proposed one is "Ubuntu.Browser".
Inside that namespace, we expose the UbuntuWebView component.
Technically you’re right though, we’re mostly exposing a webview, not browser features. So when we do the switch, we could rename the namespace to "Ubuntu.WebView".