Any plans to upgrade to PyQt 5?

[Ecno92]

Splash is using PyQt4 while PyQT5 is already available.
I was wondering if there are already plans or ongoing efforts related to upgrading to PyQt5.

If not: is it desireable and realistic to set a goal for this project to upgrade to the newer Qt version incuding the newer webkit browser in the near future?

[kmike]

I think that we should eventually upgrade to PyQT5 and Qt5 (PyQT5 can be used with Qt4), but there is no a concrete schedule. The goal of porting to PyQt5 and Qt5 is both desirable and realistic, but when it happen depends on people willing this feature. It is unlikely to happen this year unless someone helps with that. January 2015 is a bit more likely, but I wouldn't count on this either. Contributions are welcome!

I've tried to make a quick experiment a couple weeks ago; one stumbling block is https://github.com/ghtdak/qtreactor which currently only supports Qt4 - see ghtdak/qtreactor#10. There is a link to qt5reactor in comments, but I haven't tried it yet.

Splash testing suite is in a good shape, so porting look doable, and it shouldn't make code unstable. The port may also fix segfaults we get sometimes on Ubuntu 14.04 or OS X (that was a motivation of my "quick experiment").

Another issue is that there is an GPL exception in PyQT4 license which allows Splash to be non-GPL, but this exception is removed from PyQT5 source code. It is still mentioned on their website though (http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/license), and there is a thread where RiverBank employee says it is not an ideological change, so I think it is fine to port to PyQt5.

I guess dropping Qt4 & PyQt4 support is fine, but if PyQt4 support is still desirable we can use one of the compatibility shims (e.g. https://github.com/pyQode/pyqode.qt; there must be other similar libraries).

[Ecno92]

Thanks for your response!
Currently I'm not in the position to put some effort in this issue, but maybe in the near future. If it isn't fixed at that time I'll keep you all up to date about my progress. :-)

[kmike]

See #222. Current code lives in https://github.com/scrapinghub/splash/tree/qt5 branch; tests pass, but there are some things missing - Dockerfile, doc updates, etc. I think it'll be merged to master after 1.7 release - there will be one more qt4-based Splash release.