Qt 4.5 and KDE 4.2

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi packagers,

Packagers that are planning to ship KDE 4.2 alongside Qt 4.5 should be aware 
of some compatibility issue that might arise there.

The most important ones are affecting Plasma. Some of the more complex applets 
contain workarounds for issues in QGraphicsLayout. These workarounds are often 
re-implemented sizeHints, extraneous calls to updateGeometry() and sometimes 
deleting and repopulating layouts. Otherwise, layouts might not update and 
resize their content properly, and resizing of contents might lead to not 
updating layouts. The visual mess that's resulting in that is left as an 
exercise to the reader ;-)

For KDE trunk, we've already removed most of those hacks that are not 
necessary in combination with Qt 4.5. KDE 4.2.0 has not received as much 
testing with Qt 4.5 as it did with 4.4, and since the behaviour has changed in 
some classes, the workaround we put in might actually be harmful.

Therefore, in order to provide the best possible user experience, please let 
us know of issues you encounter, especially in Plasma combined with Qt 4.5. 
The Plasma team is willing to work out the kinks that might be there, but 
we'll need help testing the fixes. The good news is that the issues are 
usually quite well visible, so they should be rather easy to catch, just watch 
out for screwed up layouting, especially where widgets resize dynamically. The 
twitter applet comes to mind here, for example.

In most cases, we'll be able to help on short notice, but as said, we'll need 
notification of the issues, and probably a bit of testing as well.

The best place for reporting those issues is the plasma-devel at kde.org 
mailinglist, send your inquiries and reports there and I'm sure we can work 
things out.

We'll be collecting patches resulting from this testing and sharing them as 
good as possible, to prevent double work as much as possible.

Finally, we're sorry for any inconvenience and extra work these issues cause, 
but we hope you understand the problem and appreciate our efforts to resolve 
the situation.

Cheers and thanks for your collaboration,
-- 
sebas

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