[Development] Qt 5 and old versions of XCB

[Craig.Scott at csiro.au]

On 18/03/2012, at 5:46 PM, Thiago Macieira wrote:

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.

No one is working on xlib and it's not a reference platform. XCB is and
it's  been around for years.

Not arguing with you on this one. But my question is how consistent is xcb
support across the major linux distributions? If ISV's can't build a binary
that they can reliably distribute, that's going to be a serious road block
for them to move to Qt5.

Support is pretty much consistent. Every Linux distro uses X.org<http://X.org>, which uses
XCB.

As for LSB, it's a matter of it being stuck in time in 2006/2007.


Just to update, xcb is now on the list of considerations for LSB 5.0. See here for the current list:

https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/en/Uplift_Target#Proposed_additions

Note that xcb is not just one library. There are additional libraries (20+?) to match the various xlib extensions. That might make compiling a static xcb library tricky if you want to support dynamically using xlib extensions at run-time like you can with Qt 4.x


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