[Development] Qt 5 and old versions of XCB

[Craig.Scott at csiro.au]

On 18/03/2012, at 9:58 AM, Pier Luigi wrote:

> 2012/3/17 Bradley Smith <bsmith at baysmith.com>:
>> 
>>> The workaround for systems that don't meet the minimum requirements is to
>>> upgrade. Running brand, new and bleeding edge Qt 5 on an old system is not
>>> a
>>> target for us. Simply upgrade -- at the very least the requirements.
>> 
>> Is it possible to upgrade just XCB? Upgrading the OS from OpenSUSE 11.1 is
>> not an option since this is a production environment used on very many
>> systems. I'm not familiar with how tightly integraded X11 and XCB are and am
>> unsure if there will be incompatibilities to upgrading pieces.
> 
> I usually build and install Qt5 along with Wayland, Mesa and CMake
> 2.8.7 (with automoc) on /opt/qt5 and I would recommend you to do the
> same for XCB.
> 


That's fine when you are only building an application to run on your machine, but for people who want to distribute Qt5 apps, this would be an undesirable solution. You'd end up having to ship the xcb libraries as well as those libraries xcb depends on as part of your package.

I asked about xcb on the LSB mailing list and early responses suggest that although xcb has been mentioned there before, it doesn't sound like it's progressed much beyond that. Dropping support for xlib and relying on xcb would thus make Qt5 a non-starter for some people.

--
Dr Craig Scott
Computational Software Engineering Team Leader, CSIRO (CMIS)
Melbourne, Australia