why kdelibs?

Sven Langkamp sven.langkamp at gmail.com
Sun Oct 31 15:44:19 GMT 2010


On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 3:58 PM, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:

> On Saturday 30 October 2010, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
>
> > Seriously, i see no gain and lots of pain. Because the "gain" in your
> words is
> > "they will maintain our stuff because we have no manpower and they do",
> but we
> > have learnt that is not true, so where is the gain?
>
> Well, I really have to sort of agree with you here. Looking at Qt,
> excellent as it is, and I would hate having to work to something else, it's
> quite obvious that Nokia/Qt Software cannot maintain everything they have
> created. QGraphicsView is fundamental to Nokia, yet only two or three people
> seem to be working on it. Phonon, QPrinter, QTextDocument... QMainWindow and
> QDockWidget stink, and Maya and Dreamworks have had to hack around it, just
> like Amarok and KOffice. It all chimes in with your argument. I don't think
> ladling the kde libs into Qt, even if it would be possible, would solve it.
> It would just add to the deprecation marathon that any big development
> environment seems bound to become.
>
> On the other hand, Krita would, I am sure, much bigger if it didn't depend
> on the KDE platform. For KOffice, we had to hack down kdelibs and package a
> pre-generated sycoca to make it work. The platform fills in the holes on
> unix platforms, but it's a pain everywhere else.
>

I think in the future the it will more go the other way around as in "We
will maintain it because they don't have the manpower". QDockWidget system
is good example. In KOffice we implemented several hacks for problem with
the dockwidget system that Qt should have fixed. KOffice, Amarok, Autodesk
and Dreamworks probably have spend more time on it than Nokia.

There are also problem where we rely on technology that Nokia has not much
interest in pushing forward. In KWord we had for a long time (and still
have) the problem that the Qt font rendering wasn't appropriate, but we had
no way to change it.

That's also a problem with Qt as it's often pretty limited especially if you
have a very demanding application like Krita, Amarok or Maya. In the future
it would be nice if Nokia would give control over these areas to the
community. Since they want to go into the mobile direction it anyway they
could give up the grip around some of the desktop components.
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