Hi! On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 at 01:38, Rodney Dawes <dobey.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mon, 2023-01-16 at 23:35 -0300, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer > wrote: > > Maintaining Qt already takes a lot of time, adding private headers > > only makes things worse. So if you want to do porting and the headers > > are not yet there you will have to build Qt itself or fix the problem > > where it really belongs: upstream. > > Upstream? Where it's not a problem, because they ship and install the > private headers?
Private headers are non stable API, and that's a problem. > No, this is an issue in Debian, because the headers are being > specifically excluded from packaging, rather than installed. Other > distributions provide these files without such politics. Why is it so > hard to maintain in Debian? The way Debian works (transitions) and man power. It is not politics, it's man power. > Fedora, OpenSUSE, Arch, etc… all have these > files available for installation and developing against. So, surely the > "maintenance burden" is not so high, right? Debian has britney to run > autopackage tests, specifically to prevent things breaking, no? Those > things still are going to break, when those files aren't provided, > since they can no longer build, no? That's actually the point: the maintenance burden **IS** high. Yes, even with britney testing stuff, we still need to manually build/trigger builds for all affected packages (all that use private headers), file bugs, cross fingers that maintainers will fix them or provide fix ourselves. Else we can't ask for a transition slot. Qt is currently (and has been mostly during all these years) maintained by one or two people. Currently Qt5 is maintained by Dmitry and Qt 6 by Patrick, and some people helping whenever possible (like me, nowadays). It's a huge task, one that would be better served by someone dedicated to it, which is not our case. So yes: man power IS an issue, and private headers only adds more man power requirements. Believe me I understand your frustration. But at the same time you don't know the pain it takes to maintain Qt as private headers get exposed. > There is nothing speculative here. The files are required to build many > things against Qt, regardless of whether it is version 5 or 6. > > Leaving the files out, only makes it harder for anyone to rely on > distribution provided packages. These are necessary for shipping KDE > Plasma 6, and many other things, in Debian. Key Plasma packages are normally an exception, and Telegram desktop is definitely not a key plasma package. And again, yes, we would love to provide **everything**. But I sincerely do not see that happening until someone has proper Qt maintenance as his/her day job. That being said the plan is to switch to Plasma with Qt 6 in Trixie (aka Debian 13), so I guess that after the freeze is over adding Qt-Wayland's private headers will be a must. -- Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer https://perezmeyer.com.ar/
