[Development] Dropping the Q prefix from class names

Boudewijn Rempt boud at valdyas.org
Sun Apr 1 18:45:15 CEST 2012


On Sunday 01 April 2012 Apr, joao.abecasis at nokia.com wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Earlier today I pushed some changes to Gerrit, Thiago suggested I bring
> it up on the mailing list before he can approve them. Given the impact
> these changes have on user code it's important that we get this merged
> to master and out in the alpha as quickly as possible.
> 
> For reference the changes can be viewed here:
> 
>     http://codereview.qt-project.org/22063
>     http://codereview.qt-project.org/22064
> 
> The first one introduces a Q namespace, which replaces the Q prefix in
> Qt5. The second patch drops the prefix in class names. This brings the
> C++ API more in line with the QML/JavaScript one and will hopefully help
> move all remaining C++ developers to JavaScript.
> 
> Still pending are patches to:
> 
> - propagate the change to the various modules;
> - drop the q prefix from file names
> - update fixqt4headers script to automatically fix user code
> - rename the Q::Qt namespace to Q::t
> 
> While we're at this, it would be good to improve our interoperability
> with C++11. I have another patch in the works that drops camelCase, in
> favor of the standardized names_with_underscores. The extra separation
> between words will be welcomed by those of us that use small fonts and
> ALL-CAPS editors.
> 
> We'll need a script to fix user code. Ideally, user classes and APIs
> also get ported to the new style. (I hear there's ongoing work for a
> refactoring tool in Creator, which should land Real Soon Now (tm))
> 
> Again, given the impact these changes will have, I urge everyone to
> pitch in, review and help bring this effort to good harbor.
> 
> Qt 5 is going to be revolutionary.
> 

This is insane. Effing, batshit insane. You propose to force people to adapt billions of lines of code because your editor is broken? There's not a single good reason for any of this, not an atom of it.

When Lars presented Qt5 at the devdays he was proud about how little effort it had taken to compile Qt Creator against Qt5. That's the way it should be. Have you got any idea of the amount of Qt4 code there is in the real world? Do you really think your script will fix all of that to conform to your tastes? It didn't work for Qt3 to Qt4.

I've got an application that's over ten years old. It's got over a million lines of Qt code. I was hoping it could continue going strong for ten, twenty years to come. It's a _real_ application.

I don't want a revolution, I don't want a revolutionary Qt4. I don't want an absolutely effing disaster like porting from Qt3 to Qt4 was -- a disaster that has taken some code bases, like Scribus, until _2011_ to recover from -- and you propose to mess with _everybodies_ code, just to get some extra double colons and underscores?

There's only one reason for Qt to exist and that is other people's code. Don't mess with that, especially not for merely cosmetic reasons. 

I don't want to have to change ten year old coding style habits -- I want to improve my application, fix bugs, add features and keep my users happy for the next ten years.

I hope Guiseppe is right and that you're too late and I hope that Qt6 is at least ten years in the future.
-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl



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