Qt 3.1b1

[Thomas Zander]

On Monday 09 September 2002 16:37, Matthias Ettrich wrote:
> On Monday 09 September 2002 15:44, Thomas Zander wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > This kind off throws out the concept of binairy compatability in KDEs
> > major versions; I can't run a product I bought from a 3th party developer
> > on a machine with Qt < 3.1 (if it has the need for Qt3.1)
> > Seems a logical constraint for an application; but upgrading is not
> > enough, you need a newly compiled kdelibs agains that version of Qt :(
> >
> > How can we tell those developers we promised BC during the whole KDE 3.x
> > series that even before 3.1 is released the BC is being broken allready;
> > "Sorry not our fault!" ??
> >
> > If nothing else; its a really big PR problem.
>
> Thomas, try thinking of Qt as a KDE library. What you are talking about is
> to upgrade e.g. libkdecore or libkfile without upgrading the other
> libraries that depend on it.  May work, or may not work. Typically we
> treated kdelibs as one package that has to get upgraded together.
>
> AGAIN: it's NOT binary compatibility that is the problem here.
>
> There are three scenarios:
>
>   1 the user that upgrades binary packages: works
>   2 the developer that upgrades kde and qt from sources: works
>   3 the developer that only uses Qt from source and KDE from binary
>     packages and wants to develop KDE applications: does not work.
>
> Who's 3? And why?

3 are all companies and projects that try to offer binairy versions of their 
software and are faced with the question of KDE AND Qt versions.

It is not enough anymore to say you need KDE3 (which implicitly needs Qt3) but 
you need to specify you need Qt3.1
I hear many people saying that RPMs are too hard to use (people actually send 
koffice bugreports saying our installer gave errors when the rpm wouldn't 
install without -force)
It just looks quite bad when installing a package you just bought or 
downloaded needs a new Qt, which needs a new KDE. Thats a lot of rpms.. This 
is why I mentioned the PR thing.

We only had KDE2 for quite a short time (in company years anyway :) which 
makes us look like we did not do binairy compatability very well. We all said 
that KDE3 was going to be _the_ platform to develop your apps against.. This 
means to packagers that they just need to post 'KDE3 needed' on the website, 
and thats it.
This would not be true anymore.

I understand your points, and for a debian user (anyone seen kde3 packages 
yet??) it would just be one 'apt-get'. But for most users its 'too hard'.

-- 
Thomas Zander                                           zander at planescape.com
                                                 We are what we pretend to be