SharpWebview incompatible with Ubuntu 24.04+ (webkit2gtk-4.1)

[rthomasv3]

Problem

SharpWebview applications fail to run on Ubuntu 24.04+ because the required libwebkit2gtk-4.0 packages are no longer available. Ubuntu 24.04 only provides libwebkit2gtk-4.1 packages.

Current Behavior

• Applications built with SharpWebview fail to start on Ubuntu 24.04+
• No migration path available for newer Ubuntu versions

Expected Behavior

• SharpWebview should work on current Ubuntu LTS releases (24.04+)
• Should support both webkit2gtk-4.0 (older systems) and webkit2gtk-4.1 (newer systems)

Root Cause

The CMakeLists.txt hardcodes webkit2gtk-4.0:

pkg_check_modules(
    webkit2 REQUIRED webkit2gtk-4.0
    IMPORTED_TARGET
)

This has the additional problem of requiring the -dev packages to be installed on Linux systems for runtime operation, which is not standard practice. Runtime applications should only require runtime packages.

$ dpkg -L libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37 | grep -E '\.(so|pc)$'
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/webkit2gtk-4.0/injected-bundle/libwebkit2gtkinjectedbundle.so
$ dpkg -L libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev | grep -E '\.(so|pc)$'
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig/webkit2gtk-4.0.pc
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig/webkit2gtk-web-extension-4.0.pc
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so

Impact

• Blocks adoption on any current Ubuntu LTS system (24.04+)
• Forces unnecessary dev package dependencies on production systems

Workaround

The following workaround gets things working on Ubuntu 24.04 by adding the Ubuntu 22.04 repository to access webkit2gtk-4.0 packages. Use at your own risk - mixing packages from different Ubuntu versions can cause system instability.

1. Add Ubuntu 22.04 repository

Add this to the bottom of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu.sources:

Types: deb
URIs: http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
Suites: jammy
Components: main

2. Install webkit2gtk-4.0 packages

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev
sudo apt --fix-broken install

3. Optional: Remove the jammy repository after installation to prevent accidental package mixing.

[rthomasv3]

Looking into this further, I was able to get a build working with Ubuntu 24.04 and libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev. I still needed the -dev package to run my project, but the required changes were fairly simple.

I updated webview.yaml to use libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev instead of libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev.

I'm also not sure if ubuntu-latest will actually work right now because I believe it's using ubuntu-24.04, and the libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev package shouldn't exist on 24.04.

The other update was to CMakeLists.txt. I just updated the Linux section to require webkit2gtk-4.1 instead of webkit2gtk-4.0.

I attempted to use a newer tag than adbb85d0f54537b8034ece0bab67c7d1438e3cda, but wasn't able to make the build work with the newer project structure in webview. That tag does seem to have compatibility with libwebkit2gtk-4.1 though, so updating it wasn't needed.

I'm happy to push a PR with these changes, but I wanted to make sure the changes make sense and that moving to 4.1 is desirable.