[Ktechlab-devel] Porting to Qt 4 --> I'd like to help

[Julian Bäume]

On Tuesday 03 February 2009 20:23:51 Juan De Vincenzo wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Well, after a lot of reading I finally found the time to sit in front
> of the machine and I was able to complete part of the porting. Overall
> the process took around one hour and a half.
The build-system (you started porting the old one to cmake) KTechLab uses at 
the moment is not the way we should go in the future. I worked on that and I 
think I found a nice way to manage it. I removed static linkage to reduce 
binary sizes. This makes it possible to integrate new features as plugins. The 
situation now is like this: Every new features results in a recompilation and 
re-linking of at least the belonging part and the ktechlab-binary. This takes 
time, eats memory and results in larger binaries for each new feature.

There are also some design (or as Zoltan called it: some sort of "anti-
design") decisions that need to be fixed.

> Attached you have a small log file I've created during the process to
> document what I was doing. Hope it is clear enough, even though you
> should keep in mind that it was done on the fly. I'll try to give it
> some format when I have the time.
>
> The thing is that now the remaining task (among others) is one with
> which I require some assistance because it involves modifying the
> code, which I'm still not ready to do. This is migrating the code from
> DCOP to DBUS, and of course there will be some more things to fine
> tune, but those can be handled at its time. Anyone could help with
> that?
Since there will be some redesign, there is no need to create a DBUS 
interface, now.

Another thing I really don't want to have in the KDE4 port is the old 
visualization system. It uses the old QCanvas architecture from Qt3 and is 
really a mess. Porting a mess to QGraphicsView really isn't worth the effort, 
since you need to touch the code not only in terms of making it compile.

> Also, please let me know if you think that there's anything missing or
> that I didn't do properly. By the way, I have the ported code here on
> my machine, would you like to take a look at it? How can I pass it
> over to you? Maybe I can upload it somewhere?
Are you familar in using git? I'll see to have something running tomorrow. 
It's not this hard.

> By the way, this was my main guide for carrying this out:
> http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/KDE4_Porting_Guide
That's a nice one, IMHO it doesn't fit for KTechLab as it is in the moment...

> I'm really keen for your feedback. =)
>
> Regards,
> Juan
bye
julian