On Mon, August 3, 2009 14:48, Ben de Groot wrote: > Jesús Guerrero wrote: > >> On Tue, July 28, 2009 09:29, Hanno Böck wrote: >> >>> While I fully understand that people want to deprecate "old cruft", I >>> assume this is far too early. (just think back how long it took us >>> to deprecate gtk+-1) >> >> I fully agree with this thought. The qt4 world is simply nowhere near >> as complete and usable (nor stable either, which is worse) as the qt3 one >> is. >> >>> I'm still on kde 3 and my previous three attemps to switch to kde 4 >>> all ended up in the conclusion that kde 4 is far from being stable >>> yet. It has tons of regressions. > > Please note that you need to make a distinction between Qt4 and KDE4! > The KDE team had already decided to move KDE3 to an overlay early next > year, with the release of 4.4. We as Qt team are just following suit. It's > just that the KDE team hasn't made as public an announcement yet.
Fair enough :) > A KDE 4.3 version is supposed to be marked stable within the next few > months, and this then clears the way for KDE3 deprecation. Not until all the kde 3 stuff has a port. I mentioned k3b and kaffeine in the previous post. K3b/qt4 is *unusable* for a lot of people. Of course, as you say, there's still a lot of time for it to improve. So the whole issue will have to be re-evaluated when the time comes. > When KDE3 will be removed early 2010, we as Qt team see no need to keep > Qt3 around any longer either. We currently have no developers who are > interested in maintaining it, and upstream doesn't either. Qt4 really is a > major improvement over Qt3, especially where it concerns non-KDE apps. I fully agree about that. And as said on the other post, there's no way that I or anyone else can tell a developer what should s/he concentrate on. If qt3 must die, then die it shall. I am just stating my view about some aspects that might not have been considered by everyone. All in all, I am a big supporter of the "do it yourself" philosophy: if something doesn't suit you, fix it yourself, which means that if I truly need a qt3 program I will take care myself. I am not going to scream around the lists asking for support from anyone if qt3 becomes unsupported, and I fully understand the aim behind this move, and agree with it because I think that we must continue moving forward, and not fixing ancient stuff which can only get worse and messier. However, one can agree with the general picture while having some doubts with specifics aspects (or just mere curiosity). >>> The amount of qt3 apps not having a sane or just no qt4 port yet is >>> probably enormous. I also maintain such packages. >> >> [...] k3b, and [...] kaffeine >> > > These are KDE apps, so you need to address the KDE team about that, not > the Qt team. But I'm assuming that if these have no working KDE4-based > version by early next year, that's just too bad. And on the other hand, > for those people who still want to use these applications, there will be > the overlay. > > So, there are very few "pure" Qt3 apps, and even fewer that have no Qt4 > port yet. The only major project I'm aware of is MythTV. If there are any > others please let me know. > > >> The qt3 stuff is stable, this is not another xmms-like thing, it works, >> and it doesn't only work, but today it works *far better* than the qt4 >> newer alternatives, in most cases anyway. > > No, Qt4 works far better than Qt3, and has loads more features. Of > course, it is up to the application developers how to use this. Do not > confuse KDE4 instability with Qt4 instability. If you compare non-KDE Qt3 > apps with non-KDE Qt4 apps, the huge improvements should be self-evident. Leaving the semantics apart, the fact is that there's no kde3 without qt3, and users might miss some *important* apps like kaffeine or k3b. A user doesn't care if the application links with kdelibs or not. The fact is that even if kde is not qt, and qt is not kde, it comes without a doubt that there must be a synchrony on the move between the two teams. Otherwise the final user is which suffers. If both are to be removed from portage at the same time, then it's fine, some users might miss some applications but well, they'll eventually find their way after screaming for a while on the forums. I am sure that whatever the decision and the timings are they will be for the best nonetheless. :) If we leave that semantic stuff apart as I said, I think that very few persons will agree that k3b/qt4 is better than the qt3 version. Actually it's the other way around. The qt4 port is too unstable. Yes, it's not qt4 fault, and I am not even saying that k3b is a showstoper: that's open for discussion. I am just signaling it as one of the offended apps :) > If you feel passionate about Qt3 and want to make the case for keeping > it in portage, then step up and become its maintainer. Not really. I use just a couple of qt3/kde3 programs, and not that much. All I just wanted is to shake this topic a bit to hear what people and developers think about this. An interesting thread. Thanks for all the insight. -- Jesús Guerrero
