Qt 4.8 QUrl.toLocalFile behavior change, impacts to KUrl (and friends)

[Christoph Feck]

On Friday 28 October 2011 17:30:44 Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > Personally i find it another joke in the history of Qt, saying
> > you maintain API and ABI (that you do) but then making functions
> > behave totally different from one version to another is just
> > plain useless.
> 
> +1
> 
> You just CANNOT change the behavior of an existing function in such
> a way.
> 
>         Kevin Kofler

Give me a break.

I am running KDE/master with Qt 4.8 branch since some time, and if 
this change would cause bugs to show up everwhere the toLocalFile() 
method is used, then I certainly had noticed this change.

From the discussion so far it looks like only KNotify is affected, and 
I am sure KNotify can be fixed to adapt to the Qt 4.8 change. If other 
issues surface, they will be noticed, because an empty file name 
certainly cannot work at all. Bugs because of missing characters in 
file names (as Thiago pointed out) are harder to see.

Additionally, this certainly is not the first time an update to Qt 
caused regression we had to fix. Starting from source-incompatible 
changes and ending with issues with the "raster" graphics system - we 
went through all of them; and for the better.

If we insist bug-for-bug compatibility in Qt for the next years, I am 
sure Qt developers will happily stop fixing any bugs.

Christoph Feck (kdepepo)
KDE Quality Team