Qt 3.2 requirement

[Matthias Ettrich]

On Monday 28 July 2003 13:25, Chris Howells wrote:
[snip]
> > The question is, what do we gain by introducing a requirement on Qt 3.2
> > and
>
[snip]
> * Bug fixes

Let me elaborate a bit on this point, because some of those bug fixes are 
rather important ones. In fact, they all are, because they all got reported 
by at least one person. Take printing as an example. Printing of non-unicode 
fonts (like Wingdings) did not work in Qt 3.1. Fixing this properly, however, 
wasn't trivial. It basically required a new font engine in Qt, which is why 
you get the fix in 3.2 and not in 3.1.

Now, it may very well be possible that some styles have some smaller issues 
when you just replace one Qt dll with the other. This is a bit the nature of 
styles. KDE's styles stretch Qt's styleability beyond its limit by making all 
sorts of assumptions about its internals (the same is true for some of the 
other subclasses in the KDE libraries, unfortunately). Qt's powerful 
introspection and interception mechanisms make this stuff possible and almost 
too easy. Well, this is fine for styles and cool effects, no doubt about 
that. What we have to be aware of is that hacks of the sort that work around 
limitations and/or bugs in the library, are likely to show some breakage when 
those limitations are removed or the bugs fixed. On the positive side, those 
drawing-breakages are typically easy to fix, and a few wrong pixels in some 
styles are less severe than e.g. broken printing or lack of support for 
writing systems used by one quarter of the earth's population.

Looking ahead I do believe we have good news for style authors in future Qt 
versions (Reference NoveHrady again).

Matthias