Request to bump Qt version requirements to 4.6.3 for KDE SC 4.5 (and above)

[Maciej Mrozowski]

On Thursday 08 of July 2010 17:51:31 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> On 08.07.10 17:36:09, Maciej Mrozowski wrote:
> > Hello
> > 
> > >From what I understand, Plasma in KDE4 Workspace 4.5 relies on
> > >notifications
> > 
> > provided by libdbusmenu-qt to control what to draw in system tray. And
> > apparently Qt <= Qt-4.6.2 contains known bug that causes 'close
> > application' notifications not to be delivered - as a result causing
> > system tray regressions - application icons not disappearing.
> > 
> > https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=232915
> > https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195998
> > https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241248
> > 
> > and similar reports.
> > 
> > Because it's quite visually exposed and obvious bug (confirmed to be
> > solved with mentioned Qt upgrade), I propose bumping Qt requirements to
> > 4.6.3 for 4.5 branch and trunk for whole KDE SC release (currently it
> > requires Qt 4.6.0).
> 
> This has already been discussed and as a compile-time requirement doesn't
> make a runtime-requirement its been dis-approved (in fact this exact bump
> was made, discussed afterwards and reverted again (see r1135987 and
> r1136437 in kdelibs). IIRC the discussion was on kde-core-devel.

Fair enough.
Bug wranglers at bugs.kde.org won't appreciate such explanation though:

"Revert r1135987: the build-time dependency should only be a minor release of 
Qt (4.6) not a patch-level release (4.6.3).

Qt maintains forward and backward binary compatibility within minor releases, 
so the patch-level releases are completely interchangable at runtime.  People 
should aim to use the latest patch-level release anyway in order to get 
bugfixes."

The question is: who cares whether Qt minor releases are interchangeable or 
not so that we can just specify minimal required dependencies to ensure only 
that stuff compiles?

"the build-time dependency should only be a minor release of Qt " - is this 
policy written anywhere? Why is it more important that code compiles than 
providing better user experience? I think it's fundamental question.

If one of goals of KDE community is striving to provide the best user 
experience by any means necessary and if bumping version of dependencies is 
guaranteed to help here for many users compiling KDE from source and actually 
giving a hint for packagers, maybe it should be doneTM.

Also, as a potential bug reporter, I couldn't really accept such bug reports 
being RESOLVED (doesn't matter whether UPSTREAM or WONTFIX), because what it 
actually means is "dontcaregoaway". Such bugs reports are valid because 
they're filled against properly built package (with respect to its build 
dependencies). It helps alienating community.

cheers

-- 
regards
MM