VOTING - Amarok2 to use Qt 4.4?

[Ian Monroe]

On Jan 3, 2008 2:50 PM, Harald Sitter <harald at getamarok.com> wrote:
> Arrrhoy!
>
> Since Qt 4.4 is offering a lot more possability (like html rendering) for us
> than 4.3, and also because it seems to be faster in terms of SVG rendering we
> might want to switch to it (earliest possability would be preview 2 since
> there are some prety big performance issues in 4.4 atm).
>
> Recent thoughts on it:
> <nhnFreespirit> the obvious drawback of switching is that we will raise the
> barrier of entry again, and just as we were beginning to get a lot of patches
> from new people
> ----
> <markey> what's the ETA for Qt 4.4 final?
> <nhnFreespirit> markey: march I think.
> <nhnFreespirit> not absolutely sure though
> ----
> <nhnFreespirit> I had another nasty little thought.... theoretically, _if_ we
> managed to time our 2.0 release with Qt 4.4, we could become a showcase App
> for Qt and get a alot of free press that way
> <apachelogger> if we release one month after 4.4
> <apachelogger> there might already be 4.4.1
> <apachelogger> more stability for us
> ----
> <markey> in what state is the context view right now?
> <markey> last I checked it was ugly, didn't really work and was slow as
> molasses
> <nhnFreespirit> markey: the contet view is actually not in that bad a
> shape.... many applets just really need to render html
>
>
> So, everyone in favor of switching the development to Qt 4.4 once preview 2 is
> out, vote with AYE.
>
> Everyone against switching to Qt 4.4, vote with NAY.

I refuse to vote, democracy sucks for running a project (or at least
the technology decisions), we've always made decisions by consensus
before.

I do think it would make sense and kind of got the impression that it
was the consensus anyways (especially since we will be releasing
post-4.4 regardless). Its really only a question of when. I do think
we should really try to get a Technology Preview that works well
enough so that can peg Amarok development to that and avoid the
"compile every Monday" mess that we've had to deal with in KDE for the
past year. I understand from lfranchi that TP1 has a crippling QGV bug
(since fixed), so TP2 at the earliest.

Note that it does mean that people will have to compile kdelibs
themselves, something they wouldn't have to do otherwise after the
15th. We could probably put off the Qt4.4 dependency if all we needed
was stuff like WebKit/QGV intergration (I'm guessing the wikipedia
plasmoid will be quick job), but QGraphicsWidget will help out so much
though. QGraphicsWidget is not the "QWidget on QGV", its just QGV
items with layouting, and layouting is a major outstanding issue for
the playlist, both in terms of functionality and code-sanity.

So in summary, I agree with Nikolaj.

Ian