Comments on: Why preventing Qt4.5 to work fine with KDE4.2 is bad !

By: Cyrille Berger

Cyrille Berger — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:30:00 +0000

@KAMiKAZOW and KevinWhat decide KOffice 2.0 schedule is 2.0 stability.Delaying 2.0 to wait for plasma 4.3 would be silly, since plasma isn't a dependency of KOffice, nothing prevent you to use KOffice without plasma, while the main userbase of KOffice is KDE users, and it will stay that way for a while, we already have people who test KOffice and use gnome, windows or Mac OSX, those people don't care about plasma and wether plasma works with 4.5, and among KDE users, there are some people who care more about applications than a few glitches in plasma.An other point to consider is that delaying KOffice to wait for KDE4.3 won't necesseraly make it better, since when it reaches a reasonnable stable state (the one we would have used to release 2.0), we would probably want to start working on the 2.1 branch, while the 2.0 branch would be left to wait for at least three monthes.And we all hope, in the KOffice community that the release will have a significant impact on our moral (3 years of development without stable release, and more than a year of stabilization has a negative impact on that) and on the visibility of the project, which is also why we want the release sooner than latter.

By: Kevin Kofler

Kevin Kofler — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:54:00 +0000

Unless something really bad happens, Fedora 11 <>will<> ship with Qt 4.5. We will import it into Rawhide soon, so we will be delivering the testing some folks (e.g. Aaron) are asking for. Hopefully we can get the kinks sorted out. Most likely it'll also hit Fedora 10 and possibly 9 updates before KDE 4.3, maybe even before the Fedora 11 release.And to us, it matters very much when KOffice 2 releases, because we want to ship Fedora 11 with KOffice 2. In fact, Rawhide already has the prereleases. (We even wanted to ship KOffice 2 in Fedora 10, but had to revert to 1.4.) So I hope the KOffice team won't get pressured into delaying their release.FWIW, I also wouldn't complain if a later 4.2.x release started requiring Qt 4.5, as long as it fixes the issues with 4.5. We can just push out 4.5 as an update to earlier Fedora releases.

By: Pan, Shi Zhu

Pan, Shi Zhu — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:56:00 +0000

I think the situation is quite clear: Plasma team is in short of human resources and had to focus on KDE 4.3. If distributions want to ship KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5 they should fix the problems in KDE 4.2 where incompatible with Qt 4.5.No one is baring Qt 4.5, but Plasma team should focus on KDE4.3 so those who want Qt 4.5 with KDE4.2 should co-operate and try to fix the problems, which shouldn't be very hard and is encouraged.

By: Pinheiro

Pinheiro — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:05:00 +0000

Just to say that Qt4.5 intruduced a problem that did not had in 4.4 it dosent do grouped alpha in svg, this is a important feature in kde and specialy in plasma….Yes we can overcome this issue by redoing the themes, and probaly we will have to do so.But the svg theme was ok and is rendered correctly in most svg renderes Qt4.4 actualy did a beter job at this specific joob.And if you want a correctly rendered plasma themes today you should not use Qt 4.5.Still thank you Qt the windows scale much faster now and im sure we can fix this bugs.

By: fgunni

fgunni — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:07:00 +0000

Just the view from a “dumb” user and KDE-Fan:I hope there will be Qt 4.5 for KDE 4.2.x as i hope for more stability.Currently, although i love KDE, there are so many bugs, crashes and more, that Qt 4.5 can hardly make it worse.

By: Kristoffer

Kristoffer — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:38:00 +0000

Statement: There is no problem. Kde 4.2 can be used with qt 4.5 with very little effort on the part of the devs, this is because the QT devs have been testing KDE 4.2 with qt 4.5 all along during their development schedule.see: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/02/10/why-kde-42-should-use-qt-45/I am running kde 4.2 on qt 4.5, not even with qt-copy, and have /less/ bugs than I had with kde 4.2 on qt 4.4.3. According to the above this is also the case for others. So if distribution ship kde 4.2 with qt 4.5 they will see /less/ bugs, _even_ in current state. If kde devs/qt devs spend one day or two days actively fixing bugs in kde 4.2 pertaining to qt 4.5 they will get a very stable GUI!(relevant or not relevant: i deleted .kde4 and started afresh when i updated the qt version, don’t know if it makes a difference)

By: Jake Sallee

Jake Sallee — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:45:00 +0000

Yet another reason why KOffice, Plasma, KDE, and major KDE projects should align their release schedules.It's not that hard people. Schedule. Communicate."Assuming" that the "plasma devs" are going to have everything worked out of plasma so everyone can write programs with Qt4.5 (release candidate) is not a good practice."If the Plasma team did not discuss this with other teams, I think that holding their position is untenable from the point of view that they bar progress in other parts of KDE."In that same thought, why couldn't the "other teams" communicate with the plasma devs?Sorry, but the plasma devs are held more responsible for things not working than most other KDE teams. I don't necessarily think that the Plasma team should be held responsible for fixing plasma to work with Qt4.5 which has been in beta and RC form for quite some time.

By: KAMiKAZOW

KAMiKAZOW — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:53:00 +0000

OK, then I’m positively surprised that you plan to release KOffice 2.0 before KDE 4.3. But when KOffice 2.0 relies on Qt 4.5 anyway, why don’t you just postpone the KOffice release a bit to be simultaneously with KDE 4.3? It’s in pre-release state for 1.5 years — a few weeks later won’t make any difference.

By: Cyrille Berger

Cyrille Berger — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:54:00 +0000

@David, Shi ZhuYou are missing the point, I don't care that plasma use Qt4.5 or Qt4.4, but by preventing plasma to use Qt4.5, it's blocking the use of 4.5 by other projects. When KOffice 2.0 is released it's going to be dependent on 4.5, because 4.5 includes important bug/crash fixes. And whatever people like KAMiKAZOW think it's going to happen before 4.3. And KOffice 2.0 isn't the only project outside KDE4.2 that use Qt as a library, there are countless open source project that depend on it and might want to use Qt4.5 before KDE4.3 is out, which is going to become a problem if distributions can't ship Qt4.5.@jos, yes you are right, the issue is a difference of behavior from Qt4.4 to Qt4.5, this is something that happen on a regular basis, especially for newly introduced features. Yet, sebas mention hacks and workarounds, and if there is something to know about hacks and workarounds, they are always going to backfire on you.

By: jospoortvliet

jospoortvliet — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:20:00 +0000

To be fair to the Plasma developers, Qt is supposed to be backwards compatible - and cleary 4.4/4.5 failed at this.Any KDE app which uses normal, available Qt features should work fine on any version equal or later than the one it was developed on. So we can't blame the plasmadevelopers for having to work around bugs in Qt...Nonetheless, it would be great if it were possible to use KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5, as that version introduces bugfixes and performance improvements.