VOTING - Amarok2 to use Qt 4.4?

[Jeff Mitchell]

On Thursday 03 January 2008, Maximilian Kossick wrote:
> On 1/3/08, Shane King <kde at dontletsstart.com> wrote:
> > Harald Sitter 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).
> >
> > Maybe this is a stupid question, or the wrong time to bring it up, but
> > anyway ...
> >
> > Why do we need Qt 4.4 for html rendering? What's wrong with khtml?
> > Aren't they essentially the same code base anyway?
> >
> > If we're trying to avoid khtml because we prefer native Qt solutions,
> > why are we using KDE at all? I ask because not having to deal with the
> > rest of KDE would make my life much simpler from a Windows perspective,
> > and would be more be practical with Qt 4.4 having Phonon. In any case it
> > seems like Qt's plan is to "embrace and extend" all the useful stuff
> > from KDE anyway.
> >
> > I remember way back in the day some apps had "optional" KDE integration:
> > they'd compile as plain Qt apps or with some KDE extensions if so
> > configured. I wonder if things could work like that.
> >
> > As far as the vote goes, I'd say AYE, since we're miles away from a
> > release I think now is a better time to switch than later.
> >
> > Shane.
>
> we need qt 4.4 for its "widgets on qgv" support, which makes it possible to
> place a html widget in the context view. that's not possible at all with qt
> 4.3/khtml at the moment.
>
> there was a discussion about writing amarok 2 as a pure qt application some
> time ago (a year?), but it was decided not to do that (thank god!).
>
> max

To add to that,

Qt is contributing some Phonon backends, sure, but not all of them.  KDE 
provides helper classes that are useful.  Plasma requires kdelibs.  KDE 
provides Solid.  Etc.

Having a baseline of kdelibs ensures that people have a known subset of 
features (Strigi, Solid, Phonon, Plasma, and more) that we can rely on being 
present.  And we already do.

Plus we get a huge amount of love and support from the KDE guys that we'd 
likely lose if we switched Qt-only.  I don't think we should forget that.

That all being said, 4.4 brings a number of plusses.  Especially the QGV 
fixes, QHtmlWidget, etc.  I'll follow Ian's lead and not vote ( :-) ) but I 
think we're all in agreement here.

--Jeff