Hi António: Your fix of the serious Qt5 font configuration bug for PLplot made our Qt5 results in PLplot-5.15.0 essentially as good as our Qt4 results for the first time ever. So ever since that release it has been on my mind to greatly reduce the complexity of our build-system *and* testing of our Qt and PyQt components by only supporting Qt5 (i.e., dropping our support for Qt4).
The current build-system situation is Qt4 is looked for first, but if it is not found Qt5 is used as a backup with the exception that Qt5 is forced if the user specifies -DPLPLOT_USE_QT5=ON (which defaults to OFF). So my proposed plan to reach the above goal with minimum disruption for users is the following: * PLplot-5.16.0. Use the exact same build system logic except that 4 and 5 are swapped. That is Qt5 is looked for first, but if it is not found Qt4 is used as a backup with the exception that Qt4 is forced if the user specifies -DPLPLOT_USE_QT4=ON (which defaults to OFF). Warn in the release notes of this change and the corresponding replacement of the PLPLOT_USE_QT5 option with PLPLOT_USE_QT4 and also mention we plan to deprecate Qt4 support in the next release and remove it in the next release after that. * PLplot-5.17.0. Deprecate Qt4, i.e., use it as a fall back from Qt5 *only* if the users sets -DPLPLOT_QT4=ON. Warn in the release notes of this change and also warn we plan to remove support for Qt4 in the next release. * PLplot-5.18.0. Completely remove support for Qt4 which will finally achieve the desired simplifications mentioned above. As someone here with a large familiarity with Qt, I would appreciate you letting me know if you forsee any trouble with this overall plan to remove our Qt4 support. And comments on this plan from the other PLplot developers here are also encouraged. I will likely implement the 5.16.0 part of the above plan late this week if there are no strong disagreements expressed here in the next several days. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
