hard-dep for Qt 4.8

[Dario Freddi]

2012/1/18 Thomas Zander <zander at kde.org>:
> On Wednesday 18 January 2012 06.35.57 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
>> I didn't say that this is a reason. I wanted to highlight the problem of
>> not  depending on 4.8 and everybody using 4.8. I'm not going to start
>> reviewing code for "is this a Qt 4.8 change".
>
> Martin,
>
> if you remember there are a lot of people using KDE that are not 'core'
> developers. Typically they are one-time developers, they are artists, they are
> translators etc.
> I just wanted to point this out since your attitude can easily be mistaken as
> not caring about the people that are not able to do the Qt upgrade. I do
> believe you care, and thats why I think its important to indeed put in that
> little bit of extra time to make sure we don't use Qt4.8 APIs.   Or just
> respond fast to a person noticing the compilation issue.

TBH, I am a bit torn here. As much as I agree with everything Martin
said, I also sympathize with Thomas, and I really think he has a
point. The conclusion is far from obvious, because making life easier
for new contributors is not a good reason for making core
contributors' life potentially harder. Also, there is a bit of
contradiction in the whole discussion: one side says that everyone
will be running 4.8 anyway, the other argues people will have
difficulty in getting latest and greatest Qt. So it's a distribution
problem, more than a technical one, but I think that was already
clear.

That said, I am in favor of moving to Qt 4.8 for a simple reason: I
believe both of you are right, but you are missing a point: the
occasional contributor is very likely to work in a branch. The
preferred workflow (oh, how many times we discussed that... anyway) is
having people doing fixes ALWAYS working in a branch, and forward-port
that. This satisfies Thomas' point, as 4.8 depends just on Qt 4.7.
Afterwards, the fix can be forward-ported either by maintainers or the
dev itself, and verified with the new versions.

Feature development and stuff like that require a full-fledged dev
environment, whatever it is, full stop. Being too permissive on very
relevant contribution might backfire on us. So in this case the Qt
version issue shouldn't be even considered - you use what master uses,
and you have no arguments against that.

At the end of the day, I think we should:

 - Emphasize the need of working in the stable branch, ESPECIALLY for
occasional contributors, who in 90% of cases want to work there
 - Communicate more with distributors to ensure they ship the right versions
 - Don't be afraid of jumping forward with dependencies for our
unstable branches

Just my 2c.

P.S.: In my vision, we moved to git also to solve this kind of issues

>
> Its not a whole lot of effort, as far as I can tell, but it does have a pretty
> big influence on our community members that may not have the computer power or
> computer savy or just the time you have.
>
> thanks :)
>
> --
> Thomas Zander