State of Krita on Windows

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Hi,

As you no doubt have noticed, if only from my increased grumpiness, I've 
spend quite a bit of time on Windows in the past week or two. There's been 
some good progress, which I want to document here, and there are some 
todo's left, which also need to be documented.

Done:

* Switched from emerge to a new build system.

Tobias has created a basically purely cmake-based build system that uses 
known-good tarballs of dependencies to build krita and all the 
dependencies. This works pretty well, with some gotchas:

    ** missing dependencies: oxygen icons, tiff, ocio, openexr, openjeg
    ** missing utilities: png2ico, so the application doesn't get an app 
icon

* Switched to kdelibs-stripped

This is basically a fork of kdelibs I created for Krita Sketch. It strips 
out dbus and all the other daemons. I updated it to KDE 4.10 and replaced
the windows wmi solid backend with Patrick von Reth's new windows backend. 
This solves the startup slowness of Krita completely as well as problems 
with showing the file dialog. However:

    ** since dbus is missing, kio jobs are broken: every place where we use 
a job ui delegate is broken.


* Made the opengl2 canvas work on Windows

After modernizing our opengl canvas, the last problem on windows as the 
place where we tried to disable double buffering after already creating a 
context. That fixed, the opengl canvas is as smooth or smoother on Windows 
as on Linux.

    ** Missing features: ocio (also on Linux), 3d cursors, gradient 
previews, opengl-based cursor outline

* "Fixed" the jumping window on creating a view for the first time.

This is a problem in kdelibs/calligra where we try to restore the docker, 
statusbar and toolbar settings of a view which also restores the geometry. 
I work around by saving and restoring the geometry around the call to add 
the view. The proper solution is to move away from kparts.

* Managing palettes is broken, so disabled the palettes docker

Palettes are broken on Linux as well, but not so bas as on Windows where 
trying to create a new palette hangs Krita. Not so good, so I disabled 
this for now. We need to rewrite our palette handling completely, 
independently of Calligra, I think, since the use cases are different.

Still real problems are:

* Packaging

   ** The scripts I use to package up Krita create basically broken 
packages that need a reboot so the windows packaging system can repair the
package before first start. I don't know what caused this.

   ** We also still need to run update-mime-database and kbuildsycoca4

   ** We also don't yet offer the user an option to select the location of 
the install

   ** The slideshows are wrongly timed

* Real bugs

   ** duplicate layer is broken

   ** Vc is said to be broken with msvc2010

   ** ...

* 32 bits packages only

   I haven't got a 64 bits msvc2010 compiler, so I cannot create 64 bits 
packages.


I'm trying to make new packages for testing today. If they are good, then 
I think that this'll be the first non-highly-experimental version of Krita 
on Windows, though, since even with the caveats it's really pretty good 
now...


Boudewijn