Qt SVG renderer

[Thiago Macieira]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>On Monday 04 August 2008, Ariya Hidayat wrote:
>> > That's what I've been told by trolls at lastest akademy, when
>> > friendly complaining ;-) with them about the quality of
>> > QSvgRenderer. Looks like it's no more the case as WebkitSvg has been
>> > said to be too slow, but I'll let some TT internal that knows stuff
>> > better than me answer.
>>
>> There is no plan (for QSvgRenderer) to support anything else than SVG
>> Tiny.
>
>what would be useful is explaining, plainly and openly, *why* this is
> the case, even if the answer comes down to "we simply don't have enough
> reason to justify investing further in this technology" or "it would be
> too much work to do otherwise".

Answers are:
- too complex
- not nearly enough demand [*]
- would take too much work
- main reason: no developer wants to invest his time on it.

[*] we've never been afraid of doing something where only KDE would 
benefit from or when only KDE demanded it, but look at the other reasons.

Internally, we work much the same way as developers work on KDE: people 
work on what they want to work on, most of their time. Sure, there are 
some things that you have to do or parts of the code that you have to 
maintain but you don't really like (my example: QHttp, QFtp, QLocale), 
but that's a small fraction of their time.

Since there's no developer feeling passionate about SVG (the last was 
Zack), the module is in maintenance mode: no new features.

This new developer who I mentioned who started looking into the icon 
problems that started this thread will try and do something. SVG is not 
his area (not the same way as it was Zack's) and so he cannot give an 
answer right now how far he can go. Nor timeframe: this could take as 
long as Qt 4.6 or 4.7.

The only way for KDE to be sure that this gets done is for someone who 
likes SVGs and wants to work on QtSvg to send their CV to us and move to 
Oslo. (Other alternatives that end up in the code getting written but 
without a work contract can be discussed too)

>but if there is no appetite to extend QSvgRenderer at all (iow, it's in
> pure maintenance mode) then i probably need to know now so i can plan
> how we will work with or around QSvgRenderer in plasma.

Let's discuss in Belgium next week.

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
    PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
    E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20080805/4de98856/attachment.sig>