[Development] Breaking up QtPlatformSupport

gunnar.sletta at nokia.com gunnar.sletta at nokia.com
Mon Mar 12 16:28:01 CET 2012


On Mar 12, 2012, at 11:24 AM, ext Thiago Macieira wrote:

> On segunda-feira, 12 de março de 2012 09.31.11, Jørgen Lind wrote:
>>> This will be hard to do with qmake, so the easier way out is to remove the
>>> .a altogether and use .pri files only. That requires moving the Wayland
>>> platform plugin back into qtbase.
>> 
>> Pretty please with sugar on top, do NOT do this. I understand that you
>> only see the "Wayland" side of things, But there are loads of people
>> interested in not having their plugin in the Qt source code. Using the
>> pri approach is STUPID! The hacks you will force upon people is just
>> not nice! We have been there, and we don't want to go back. Lets just
>> keep/"add again" the -l flags, and let configure figure out if their going
>> to be included or not.
>> 
>> Building platform plugins outside the Qt source tree IS a usecase we'r
>> going to support. Not only because of QtWayland but because there might
>> be someone developing ie. an ios plugin that they don't want to have inside
>> QtBase. People might have special HW that where they just write a plugin
>> to do special ioctl to controll the display. We don't want all plugins to
>> be in QtBase but more importantly we can expect all plugins to be in
>> QtBase.
> 
> Building plugins outside of QtBase will continue to be permitted, provided 
> they don't use QtPlatformSupport. That library is just convenience for us. 
> There is absolutely no public API there. If there are things needed by many 
> plugins, we should consider making proper, public API instead.

Not only will building platform plugins outside QtBase be permitted, it will in fact be the primary usecase if we consider Qt's future on embedded devices. Most good adaptations will want to do something hardware specific. It is not just convenience for us inside QtBase.

We can talk about making it into a nicer API in a future version of Qt, but for Qt 5, we should keep it as it is. 

cheers,
Gunnar


More information about the Development mailing list