That is a big issue as we are trying to kill the old versions because they are dead and vulnerable for ages. Reading: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/runescape-launcher/?comments=all it seems it could be used for render ads :/ Is upstream aware of the issue? What happens when webkit-gtk:2 is not present?
I believe you're correct, in that webkit-gtk is only used for rendering ads for players without a paid subscription to the game. In the past, there used to be a clause in the game's ToS that implied blocking the ads could result in an account ban, but I can't see any such item in the current ToS nor EULA. I'll test it this evening after work and see what the behaviour is when webkit-gtk:2 is not present.
Unfortunately upstream's binary fails to launch if webkit-gtk:2 is not installed, as it is linked against libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0. It seems also that the equivalent library installed by webkit-gtk:4 is not ABI compatible, as symlinking it as libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0 simply to test results in a segfault. For what it's worth, this isn't the only package on my system that requires webkit-gtk:2, app-office/gnucash requires it too. How do you want to proceed here?
For now we will wait until all the other reverse deps are migrated (most of them are in progress, also gnucash), but you should try to let upstream know the issue as we will treeclean the old webkit-gtk soon. You can tell them that also Fedora (that is more widely used) is doing the same for their next major version)
Some people in https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/runescape-launcher/?comments=all has posted more recent comments suggesting that the dependency could no longer be needed (comments are from April) :/
[master ec9b40b1cb8] games-rpg/runescape-launcher: Looks to work without webkit-gtk:2 as also commented by ArchLinux users (#608610) 1 file changed, 83 insertions(+) create mode 100644 games-rpg/runescape-launcher/runescape-launcher-2.2.4-r1.ebuild It seems to open and work for me
