Qt 3.2 requirement

Bernhard Reiter bernhard at intevation.de
Fri Jul 25 13:32:11 BST 2003


On Friday 25 July 2003 13:16, Stephan Kulow wrote:
> On Friday 25 July 2003 12:24, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> > On Wednesday 23 July 2003 21:31, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> > > I would prefer, if we could keep compatibility with Qt 3.1 for as long
> > > as possible, at least until it is part of the major distributions.
> > > Requiring a developer to compile a new Qt in order to be able to test a
> > > patch for any KDE application in the KDE CVS is, in my opinion, too
> > > much. This will prevent some people from contributing to KDE and that's
> > > clearly not what we want.
> >
> > I second that.
>
> I see this as very weak argument. Compiling kdelibs takes longer than Qt
> and while kdelibs changes daily (possibly incompatible), we talk about a
> one time Qt compilation.
> If Qt 3.2 is released and has less bugs than Qt 3.1.x, we should require it
> as supporting two is a nightmare.

It is a question going beyond the pure compile time.

In my experience your argument leads a huge block
consisting of QT /kdelibs /application that is changed altogether,
leading to a lower quality of the overall system, because the resistance
to make incompatible changes to the underlying libaries is lowered.
Qt 3.2 is not a bug-fix only release, it has incompatible changes.
In my experience changing to it will make the situation more unstable.
You could see it as testing QT 3.2 with KDE.
Weaknesses or bugs in QT 3.1.2 at least are stable.

When trying to fix bugs in currently used KDE versions,
I've frequently been pointed to try the "latest" and "greatest"
version from CVS on the whole block because that was what
developers are using. It lead to problems which were not present 
before and I did not get to the point in actually fixing the application bug.
It is not a weak argument, because stablising KDE application code 
towards a certainly level is getting very cost intensive.

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