On Monday 02 Aug 2004 14:56, Chris Cannam wrote: > No. And I'd probably be happier if Qt 4 was never released. [...]
Well, I'll expand on this, since as it stands it's not really fair to the developers of Qt or KDE. The problem, of course, is that there are always too many versions of everything. We can't have any idea what will actually happen when someone tries to build or run Rosegarden. It's just a typical Linux packaging problem -- although with an added bit of ire because some of the 3.x releases of Qt have actually been source incompatible with one another as well. The situation was probably simplest when KDE 3 was reasonably new, at the point where we decided to drop KDE 2 support -- or maybe a little later when we dropped Qt 3.0 support and demanded 3.1. (There was actually a new function in 3.1 that we needed, so my comment about having nothing new in Qt since 3.0.x wasn't quite accurate.) But now anyone downloading RG sources and building them themselves is likely to have any of the following (where I'll asterisk anything that I have the ability to test with at the moment): kernel 2.4* or 2.6; gcc-3.1, 3.2*, 3.3* or 3.4; qt-3.1*, 3.2* or 3.3; kde-3.0?, 3.1*, 3.2*, 3.3; LinuxThreads* or NPTL. Some of those are unlikely in combination, but almost all of them can be found with more than one other of each (e.g. KDE 3.2 can be found with Qt 3.2 or 3.3 and with any compiler and kernel). People sometimes moan about the audio-related dependencies of Rosegarden (ALSA, JACK, DSSI, LADSPA, liblo etc) but actually they're much simpler to manage because none of them has an interface that's changed substantially since we started properly using it, and none of them has ever (as far as I'm aware) introduced any serious runtime incompatibility either. Whereas Qt (which of course I'm aware is a much larger library) has broken things many times for us in the 3.x series alone. Of course its developers keep seeing a need and implementing new things, but when we can't afford to drop the old things, that's of little use to us. My comment about KDE was more unfair -- it is of course positively a good thing that KDE 3.2 didn't introduce lots of new stuff wholesale and break everything built for 3.1. KDE 3.2 was in fact a very admirable release, lots of bug fixes and consolidation, some nice GUI theme bits, and not too much else. Chris ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now, one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
