[lsb-discuss] Qt stuff from conf call minutes 2011-07-27

[Jeff Licquia]

On 07/27/2011 07:17 PM, Craig.Scott at csiro.au wrote:
> Hi guys, just giving some feedback on the list of Qt libraries shown in the last conf call minutes. From that list, here are the libs that are not currently in LSB:

Awesome, thanks!

> libQt3Support.so - given that LSB is looking to remove support for Qt3, this library should probably not be added now (I'm surprised it wasn't in the LSB before though).

It might be useful for any stragglers still porting Qt 3 apps.  It 
probably should have been added before.

It's my understanding that it doesn't actually pull in any linkage to Qt 
3; it just provides some aids for porting Qt 3 apps to 4.

> libQtDBus.so - long overdue for inclusion, but needs main DBus library to be added to LSB first. If DBus lib gets added, I'd strongly recommend libQtDBus.so gets added as well.

Yes, we're planning to add this (along with DBus itself).

If we include Qt bindings to DBus, I imagine we'll get calls for 
including the GObject bindings as well.  We might want to consider this 
when thinking about the work needed.

> libQtDesignerComponents.so, libQtDesigner.so - both of these are mature libraries and should be good candidates for inclusion. The latter is likely to be more widely used (it allows dynamic loading of UI's, whereas the former is for adding functionality to the Qt Designer tool).

I suspect we're not so interested in providing support for LSB-compliant 
Qt Designer modules.  But dynamic UI support is definitely interesting.

> libQtMultimedia.so - This library has some chance of being dropped from Qt, so I'd recommend not adding it to the LSB for now.

I thought it was odd on the call that I couldn't find a copy of the lib 
on my system (Ubuntu Natty, Qt 4.7.2).  Maybe it's already been dropped.

> libQtWebKit.so - Again, as much as I'd like to see this added for selfish reasons, it would need careful consideration before adding this. Qt are about to uplift to a more recent WebKit in either Qt 4.8 or 5.0 and I can't comment on the API stability of WebKit itself. It is quite possible that the interfaces in libQtWebKit.so will remain stable, in which case it would be great to see this added to LSB. I suspect, however, that there may be some kinks in getting this one nailed down for inclusion in LSB. Adding this requires at least Qt 4.4. Also note that in order to build this module, you have to patch a number of files to make the build LSB compliant. I've documented those in the Qt bug tracker and also reported the issues upstream to the webkit bug tracker, but there were too many hoops for me to jump through to follow through and get the changes incorporated into the official webkit repo.

In theory, if QtWebKit were included in the LSB, this wouldn't be a 
problem anymore; users of WebKit would just have to conform to this 
particular API.

As with DBus, I imagine that we'd probably have calls for GTK+ WebKit 
bindings if we included Qt bindings.

> As a final note, it would seem that Qt 4.4 is a minimum requirement for a number of these, but I believe an uplift to 4.4 is already on the cards for the LSB?

Yup.  We're targeting 4.7 as of right now.