[kde-solaris] Gentle Question

[Manish Chakravarty]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 9:44 PM, S h i v <shivakumar.gn at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 9:25 PM, Michael Schuster
> <Michael.Schuster at sun.com> wrote:
> > Moinak Ghosh wrote:
> >
> >  >    It is a tricky situation. GCC C++ tends to break ABI compatibility
> >  >    with itself now and then which is real trouble. On the other hand
> >  >    simply building KDE4 with SUN Studio is just a first step. There
> >  >    are N KDE applications out there and each and every one of them
> >  >    will require porting to build with SUN Studio essentially making
> it
> >  >    difficult to get more KDE apps on Solaris. Kinda porting hell.
> >
> >  well ... IMO, "porting" an app once and then knowing it's going to run
> for
> >  the foreseeable future, even if other applications around it are
> changing,
> >  is less of a hell than having to chase ever-newer compiler releases
> with
> >  the potential ABI changes they bring.
> >
>
> Port once and live happily for foreseeable future is a myth.
>
> Software moves due to newer versions.
> Compiler moves due to compiler updates albeit much slowly.
>
> What to play catchup with is the choice to be made.
> KDE + huge set of KSoftwares is good bit of work to port and then keep
> up to date with the future *ongoing* updates.


I "ported" my app , KWebTest [1] on both gcc-compiled kde 3.5.8 and Sun
Studio compiled kde 3.4.3
KWebTest is around  2,000 lines of C++ code. It uses the KDE API's for
drawing pretty much everything.
Internally it uses a lot of pointer arithmetic and memory
allocation/de-allocation (but no fancy template stuff though)

How much effort did I have to put in? Not much at all! -
http://manish-chaks.livejournal.com/84564.html

Similar steps for Konversation- a well-known KDE app -
http://manish-chaks.livejournal.com/85335.html
Similar steps are required for Sun CC; I have compiled these apps on
SS-compiled KDE 3.4.3 myself.


My point?
1) Well written KDE apps will compile cleanly on gcc AND SS compiled KDE's
2) My understanding is that most of the code changes required are being
committed back upstream. This makes the KDE code a little cleaner.
3) A LOT of effort is required to get KDE4 cleanly up an running using SS12.
A lot of outstanding work has been done by a few people on this mailing list
to that end ( we all know who they are). Taking this work to it's logical
conclusion would be really interesting. You would then be able to choose
between SS12 and gcc-compiled KDE4. And open source software is about choice
, isnt it ? :)


[1] http://code.google.com/p/kwebtest

>
>
> There are compelling arguments on both sides & I am for now in the gcc
> camp :)
>
> -Shiv
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-- 
Manish Chakravarty
http://manish-chaks.livejournal.com/
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